Superstar praises Svalbard Global Seed Vault

18.02.18 | News
One Tree Hill star Sophia Bush visited Svalbard on Monday, calling in on what is often referred to as the most important room in the world – the Global Seed Vault.

As well as starring in hit series like One Tree Hill and Chicago P.D., Bush is also a passionate environmentalist. On the day she visited the Seed Vault she posted on Instagram:


“Svalbard. 78° degrees north. One of the northern most inhabited cities on the planet. We arrived, 45 of us, on a mission that we knew was important but having no real clue what to expect. The place we were going sounded like the plot of a Bond Film....”

Bush visited the Vault as a guest of Crop Trust, an organisation dedicated to raising funds for the Global Seed Vault, which is run by the Nordic institution Nordic Genetic Resource Center (NordGen).

The Seed Vault celebrates its first decade this year. Next week, the milestone will be marked by a visits from the Norwegian Minister of Agriculture and Food, Jon Georg Dale, and the Secretary General of the Nordic Council of Ministers, Dagfinn Høybråten.

The future of food, and thus the future of humanity, lives and breathes by what exists behind these ice crystal-covered doors.

Climate change leads to much more than extreme weather events and melting ice caps. It also makes it more important than ever to maintain the diversity of seed types needed to produce food for a growing population.
More than one million seed samples have been deposited in cold storage at the Global Seed Vault since it opened, and the initiative has already borne fruit. Right now, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), is recreating its previous gene bank in Aleppo in other, safer, places with the help of seeds stored in Svalbard. Without the Global Seed Vault it would not have been possible.

Sophia Bush also wrote about this on Instagram:
“In case of disaster. Blight. Desertification. War. The future of food, and thus the future of humanity, lives and breathes by what exists behind these ice crystal-covered doors.