Located near the village of Longyearbyen on the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, the vault has in one year amassed a collection of more than 400,000 unique seed samples – some 200 million seeds.

To mark the first anniversary of the vault, experts on global warming and its effects on food production are in Longyearbyen to discuss how climate change could pose a major threat to food production, and to examine crop diversity’s role in averting crisis. They include the authors of a study published recently in Science magazine warning that by the end of this century the average temperatures during growing seasons in many regions will probably be higher than the most extreme heat recorded over the last 100 years. Rajiv Sharma spoke to one of the authors of the study, Prof. David Battisti, and asked him first about the seed vault.