The Global Seed Vault - sometimes known as the "Doomsday Vault" -  in Svalbard, Norway, houses duplicate seed samples from across the world. Built in 2008, it currently houses 1.2 million seed samples, with room for millions more. Its purpose is to secure the foundation of the global food supply in the event of catastrophe. Located in the Arctic Ocean between Norway and the North Pole (and well above the Arctic Circle), Svalbard is the furthest point north serviced by commercial airlines. Its remote, icy location makes it an ideal place to store the world's seeds. Yet even Svalbard has been impacted by climate change. Warming in the Arctic is occurring at an accelerated rate, and winter temperatures are 7 C degrees warmer than they were just 50 years ago. In 2016, high arctic temperatures caused the permafrost to melt: meltwater flooded the entrance to the seed vault, where it refroze. The vault itself was unharmed, but it raised questions about the ability of the vault to withstand disaster. Said Norwegian government official Hege Njaa Aschim, "It was not in our plans to think that the permafrost would not be there and that it would experience extreme weather like that. [...] It was supposed to [operate] without the help of humans, but now we are watching the seed vault 24 hours a day." 

The Svalbard Seed Bank made its first withdrawal in 2016, when the Syrian Civil War placed Icarda's Aleppo facility under threat. The 150,000 samples housed in Aleppo represented 10,000 years of knowledge cultivated by generations of farmers in the Fertile Crescent. Researchers are currently recreating the entire collection for storage in Lebanon and Morocco, lest this collective knowledge be destroyed through warfare.

There are over 1700 genebanks across the world, including the National Laboratory for Genetic Resource Preservation (NLGRP) in Fort Collins, Colorado. The NLGRP, built in 1953, houses seeds, twigs (for fruit trees like apples that grown from grafting and not directly from seeds), root fragments, and DNA samples of various livestock. All new seed patents registered in the United States are required to be stored at the NLGRP, and the NLGRP distributes its stock with researchers around the world to develop new plant and animal technologies and to ensure biodiversity. 

Historically, researchers working in these seed banks do not take their charge lightly. Soviet biologist Nikolai Vavilov, born in 1887 (in what was then Russia), witnessed many crop failures throughout his childhood, due to drought, flooding, insects, extreme weather, and more. Recognizing that a lack of biodiversity in domesticated crops left them too weak to fight off hardship, he gathered wild samples to cross-breed with domesticated crops to make them heartier. In 1917, Vavilov was appointed head of the Bureau of Applied Botany, and he soon began making seed-gathering expeditions. Vavilov approximately 115 expeditions to 64 countries, gathering some 380,000 specimens that were stored in Leningrad. In 1930, the bureau became the Institute of Plant Industry. It not only collected plant material for safekeeping, but also scientifically studied that material.  

Unfortunately, ideology and war impacted this work. Vavilov was targeted by party leaders because the science of genetics clashed with Soviet ideology. While collecting seeds in Ukraine in 1940, Vavilov was arrested and sent to the Gulag. Meanwhile, Nazi forces targeted the Leningrad, in part to gain control of the seed bank. If Soviets distrusted genetics, believing that it was used to justify class differences, the Nazis trusted in genetics too much, allowing it to fuel their ideology of racial purity and superiority. 

Nazi forces laid siege to Leningrad, cutting off supply lines in order to literally starve the populace into submission. Rations lasted for a few months, but eventually these were depleted. The only food in the city was stored in the Bureau of Applied Botany, but the scientists remained committed to stewarding the collection, standing guard 24 hours a day. Indeed, one scientist reportedly died at his desk, studying a package of peanuts. In total, nine scientists - and 700,000 citizens of Leningrad - died of starvation. Wrote one scientist, "It was hard to walk. It was unbearably hard to get up in the morning, [even] to move your hands and feet . . . but it was not in the least difficult to refrain from eating up the collection."

As Leningrad was under siege, Vavilov was being tortured and interrogated in the Gulag. Officers demanded that his scientific findings conform to Soviet politics, but Vavilov would not renounce his understanding of genetics. He reportedly said, "We shall go into the pyre—we shall burn. But we shall not retreat from our convictions." As part of the campaign to break him, Vavilov was fed a nutritionally deficient diet of mashed cabbage and moldy flour. The man who sought to eliminate famine was starved to death in 1943. He was just 55 years old. Yet his institute, and the seeds it protected, lives on. Renamed the N. I. Vavilov All-Russian Scientific Research Institute of Plant Genetic Resources (VIR in Russian), it has donated seeds to Svalbard, many of which might date back to Vavilov's expeditions.