GCA Scholarship Recipient’s Documentary Explores Valuable Seed Vault

Global Seed Bank Protects Over One Million Seeds

February 26, 2025

By: Sid Hancock

800 miles from the North Pole, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault protects critical genetic resources: over one million seed varieties from nearly every country in the world. The concrete structure, located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen in the remote Arctic Svalbard archipelago, was created by conservationists and opened by the Norwegian Government in 2008.

Charly Frisk, GCA 2021 Zeller and 2022 Engle Scholar, explains, “The vault functions much like a bank for the world’s seeds, only the country that deposited the seeds can withdraw.”

As a graduate student at Yale School of the Environment, Frisk was granted access to the vault while filming “Frø: Nordic Seed Heroes,” a documentary on the importance of seed diversity. 

“While the vault is often viewed as a last resort for emergencies, especially with a colloquial nickname like the ‘Doomsday Vault,’ it has been accessed for a variety of reasons,” says Frisk. “The first withdrawal happened in 2015 during the Syrian Civil War, when the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) needed to reestablish its genebank collection after a genebank was destroyed during the war. When seeds have been withdrawn to restore genebanks, the offspring from those withdrawals are returned to replenish the vault.”

Says Frisk, “Visiting the vault was one of the most transformative memories for me while filming—hiking up the vault, knowing it holds thousands and thousands of diverse seeds and stories, was humbling. It renewed my belief in our collective ability, as a planet, to protect the biodiversity that sustains us.”