EMILY BEAMENT

When the doomsday vault opens in the freezing Arctic archipelago of Svalbard this week, it will mark the latest attempt to preserve our natural resources in the face of climate change and other threats the planet faces.

It builds on work by seed banks around the world that aim to conserve the agricultural and wild plant species on which life on earth depends.

Cary Fowler, the man behind the doomsday vault, said the back-up crop seed bank had been constructed in the context of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina and a recognition that contingency plans had to be made against natural or man-made disasters.

After those events, he said, "there was a lot of recrimination, a sense of the inevitability of catastrophe and everybody was pointing the finger and asking why didn't someone do anything?'".

Experts who work in the field of seed preservation and crop diversity know seed banks are losing stores through everyday problems, and occasionally through natural disasters or civil strife.

With that knowledge, a failure to plan for such events would raise the question of whether they were any different from those who should have been planning for Hurricane Katrina, he said.

While there was no evidence of any group that would want to target the doomsday vault, it has been built with a number of security measures because "we don't know what the world is going to be like in 50 to 100 years from now".

As well as mainstream and commercial varieties of crops, there is great diversity of plants grown throughout the world's farms and gardens - many of which have not yet been collected and put in gene banks.

For those that have, the doomsday vault aims to provide a back-up to the existing network of crop seed banks.

But it is not just crops that can be preserved by seed banks, and some work to preserve the planet's wild plant life which form the basis of ecosystems and provide medicines, crop improvements, building materials and fuels.

In the UK, the Millennium Seed Bank Project aims to preserve wild plants to combat threats to survival such as climate change, invasive species and over-exploitation.

The project aims to collect specimens and data on 24,200 species worldwide, including the UK's entire seed-bearing flora.