Farmers will need to experiment to cope with climate change.

Cary Fowler helped create the world’s largest seed bank, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which stores more than 780,000 crop varieties in a mountain in the Norwegian Arctic. Climate change is the biggest challenge farming has ever faced, he says, and to survive it we need to learn much more about plants.

Why are seed banks important?

I call them an insurance policy for the globe. Without crop diversity, farming isn’t going to adapt to climate change, and neither are we. It’s the biggest challenge that agriculture has faced since the Neolithic days when agriculture began. We’re going to see a change in seasonality, growing seasons that no longer align with rainfall—everything will be out of whack. If you think the recent droughts in the U.S. Midwest and California were bad, we’ve got more of this coming, and it’s going to get worse.

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Is it enough just to save seeds in seed banks?

No, you also need to know what you have there. To use an analogy, it may be in the library, but we don’t yet have it card-cataloged for the kinds of traits that we will need in the future. At the moment, virtually no seed bank is geared up for screening seeds and providing good answers to farmers who need new crop varieties in order to adapt to climate change. If a new disease comes along and you need resistance, and that resistance isn’t found in the crops that are already in your field, you’ll go out of business or starve.