Inside the Millennium Seed Bank, our biological safety net in a changing world

Over half the trees in Kew Gardens could be dead before the end of the century. You’d think they’d be better plant protectors at the Royal Botanic Gardens, but this isn’t botched botany – Kew just monitor their trees more closely than the rest of us.

A similar percentage of trees across the country are under threat. Not just trees, all flora. From flowers (Kew scientists estimate 45% of flowering plants are at risk of extinction) to the crops we need to feed ourselves.

Luckily we have a biological safety net. While the Millennium Dome was a big, white, circular-shaped elephant and the Millennium Bridge got off to a wobbly start, the Millennium Seed Bank, tended by Kew, has been a success, with its greatest achievements yet to come as we are forced to adapt to a changing climate.

Over the last 25 years, 2.5 billion seeds from 40,000 wild plant species have been cleaned, dried and stored in freezers in Wakehurst, Sussex.

Dr Christopher Cockel has a long history at the bank, overseeing their Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change project. In early 2020, when Big Issue last spoke to him about his work, Covid-19 was just about to reach our shores.

Was the global pandemic at least a useful reminder of why storing seeds is important when it seems like the end could be nigh?

“Yes, that’s probably true,” he says. “A lot of Kew staff were furloughed. I opted not to be because I felt
there were still activities I could continue in order to complete the project. My task was to send seeds to the other side of the world. What I didn’t anticipate is that everywhere else would close down. A learning experience was that if bodies dealing with the paperwork aren’t functioning, the material is still safe but it’s stuck.”

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Charlotte Lusty, head of seed collections, explains that the purpose of the seed bank is not solely to help regrow civilisation after major catastrophe. “It’s not going to be one big disaster, it’s many, many small ones happening all the time,” she says.

“That’s what seed banks are for; recovering species and habitats where they’ve been lost, researching which ones are going to be resilient to future climate events. Instead of just collecting lots of species, we’re collecting lots of diversity within the species so we can match the right kind of population adaptation to the right areas.”

Cockel gives the example of a wild rice collected from an estuary in Pakistan. “That shows some degree of salt tolerance, so that can make domesticated rice more resilient to degraded land.”

Lusty continues: “You take a wild relative, looking at its genetics to see what gives it that trait, then you’ll start breeding until you’ve got something that is acceptable to eat, plus it has the nice trait that had disappeared from the cultivated version.”

Kew works with 279 partners from 100 countries to bolster food security.

“You need international collaboration,” Lusty says. “Throughout human history, we’ve moved agricultural plants around. With a change of climate, that urgency to move the right plants that will survive in different areas is greater than ever.

“Reports from the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN are talking more about wild species and how important they are in future food security of crops. Not just for breeding, but also for what they call new opportunity crops. They’re recognising that the world has been dominated by a few crops for too long.

“I think the Ukraine war really hit home, everyone realised we’re so dependent on one country for food prices. So there’s a big movement in agriculture to diversify, both in terms of the new varieties that are coming out, but also the types of crop that are being grown.

“Crops like amaranthus have never been widespread and they’re very resilient because they haven’t been bred so much, they still have some of the traits of the wild plant.”

Wild plants are still proving their importance by leading to new discoveries and applications, from medicine (warfarin is an anticoagulant drug developed in the last century from clover seeds) to industry (guar gum, from the guar bean, is used to thicken the fluid used in fracking).

The Millennium Seed Bank has spent the first 25 years storing seeds; the aim for the next 25 years is to make better use of the collection. The biggest challenge isn’t just climate but funding.

“The time-consuming, expensive part is the research,” says Lusty. “We need to get a scientifically rigorous idea of what these wild species can do. Right now, it’s a little bit of a lucky dip: let’s try these species because they’ve grown in this region, we think they might be good for this trait or that trait. There’s a high degree of failure. 

“We need a lot more research on wild species in order to know their value. That would help everyone realise plants have versatility, they do have resilience to climate, they do have a lot of extraordinary aspects that will be really important for solutions to issues we face.”

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