LEARN THE SECRETS OF THE MILLENNIUM SEED BANK

The Millennium Seed Bank in Wakehurst safeguards around 38,000 different species of plant from all around the world, making it an apt host for this year’s Kew Science Festival, which has the theme of ‘rare and threatened’. Here are three things we found out about the Millennium Seed Bank… KEW SCIENCE FESTIVAL WAKEHURST 21-22 JULY 2018 1. IT’S WHERE YOU’D WANT TO BE DURING THE APOCALYPSE

Whether it’s WWIII, nuclear catastrophe or natural disaster, if you were tucked away inside the Millennium Seed Bank, you’d likely survive it all. Its vault is flood-proof, bomb-proof and radiation-proof, and the photovoltaic panels on the roof provide enough electricity to power the freezers in the vault. It has the capacity to house 75 per cent of world’s storable seeds, so once the planet was ready to inhabit again, you’d have a lot of planting to do.

2. IT SERVES AS A BACKUP FOR 80 PER CENT OF THE WORLD’S FOOD

That 80 per cent comes from just 12 crop plants, and the Millennium Seed Bank is building a store of the wild relatives of each of those in the Wild Species Seed Bank. For example, there are several wild relatives of rice that have characteristics that are useful for things like disease resistance, yield, and early morning flowering (so that flowers aren’t affected by higher daytime temperatures). These traits aren’t in domesticated species, but if needed, they can be put back in to domesticated crops to make them more resistant to a changing world.

3. IT HOUSES SEEDS THAT ARE ILLEGAL IN THE UK

Around 30,000 species of plants are protected by CITES, banning anyone from importing them into the UK. Mostly, these are endangered plants being protected against overexploitation through international trade, similar to how ivory is being banned to deter poachers. The Millennium Seed Bank is the UK’s scientific authority for the trade in illegal plants, so if any come in to Heathrow, they end up at the Millennium Seed Bank’s quarantine facility.