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4w ago

Svalbard Seed Vault Wins Princess of Asturias Prize for International Cooperation

The award recognizes the vault as a multilateral safety copy for crop diversity and signals wider global cooperation to protect food supplies.

Imagen del Banco Mundial de Semillas de Svalbard (Noruega).
La Bóveda Global de Semillas de Svalbard gana el Princesa de Asturias de Cooperación Internacional
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Overview

  • The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was awarded the Princess of Asturias Prize on Wednesday for its role as a shared, neutral repository that safeguards crop genetic material.
  • The facility holds more than 1.3 million seed samples representing over 6,000 species from 249 countries and serves as an emergency backup for national and regional genebanks.
  • In February 2026 the vault accepted its first major olive deposit of 25,000 seeds covering 50 varieties from the University of Córdoba, expanding representation for a key food crop.
  • Norway owns the rock-cut vault near Longyearbyen and operations are run under an agreement with NordGen and the Crop Trust so deposited seeds remain the property of the submitting banks.
  • The vault has proven utility and vulnerability: duplicates helped rebuild ICARDA’s collection after the 2015 Syrian war and a 2017 permafrost melt flooded the access tunnel, prompting a roughly $13 million repair that highlighted climate and infrastructure risks to Arctic storage.