A team of scientists on the front lines of climate change is helping nature heal itself. But as wars rage around them, it's making their efforts to feed an increasingly hungry globe that much harder.
The grey triangular concrete juts into the air. Its sharp lines contrast a landscape where it's hard to differentiate between the frozen surface and a clear, endless sky.
Sitting on Svalbard, in the Norwegian archipelago, the Global Seed Vault is as far north as a scheduled flight will take you. It makes it remote but still accessible.
Dubbed a doomsday vault, it's essentially a Noah's Ark for crops; an international backup to preserve humanity.
Double doors stand at the end of a gangplank that takes people deep inside the permafrost. From here, it's just 120 metres into the frozen mountain to reach the foundations of global food supplies.
The chambers, chilled to -18 degrees Celsius, house floor-to-ceiling metal shelving, dotted with coloured hard plastic boxes.
Inside are sealed, custom-made, three-ply foil packages that safely store 1.2 million seed samples from every country on Earth.
While a select few have entered the vaults to deliver seeds, just one person has ever felt the weight of taking seeds out.
Scientists fleeing war
"I knew how important it was to complete my mission," says Athanasios Tsivelikas.
Tsivelikas, an agricultural researcher, was sent to Svalbard in 2015 on behalf of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) after the civil war forced his organisation to leave Syria.
ICARDA's mission is to reduce poverty and enhance food, water and nutritional security in the face of global challenges. Its focus is on the developing world, where it hopes its research can help bolster crop yields, farmer incomes and ensure people have access to food where they live.
When Tsivelikas joined ICARDA in late 2012, the organisation had fled its base 30 kilometres south of Aleppo.
Dissatisfaction with President Bashar Al-Assad had prompted large pro-democracy rallies and protests across Syria, fuelled in part by the Arab Spring uprising.
Government crackdowns met resistance and soon civil war engulfed the country.
These photos show the damage after a Syrian Air Force strike hit a wheat factory in Ras al-Ain, near the border with Türkiye, in November 2012. (Reuters)
"We had this nice premise that we had developed in Syria," says Ahmed Amri, Tsivelikas's predecessor, who for many years was the head of ICARDA's genetic resources unit.
Amri and his team fled to Tunisia. But as the war continued to rage, it quickly became clear that returning to Syria wasn't going to be an option.
It wasn't just their homes they'd left behind. The seeds they'd spent decades collecting were now stranded in a war zone.
Archival photographs show ICARDA scientists working in Syria before the war. (Supplied)
With no way to reach them, and years of research all but lost, ICARDA was forced to resort to its backups.
Prior to the war, ICARDA had protected much of its work by storing copies in gene banks scattered around the world. About 83 per cent of the full Syrian collection was safely locked up in the Svalbard vault — it would be up to Tsivelikas to retrieve them.
Having set up replacement gene banks in Lebanon and Morocco, he found himself on a plane headed north, on a first-of-its-kind mission to re-collect the seeds ICARDA had lost.
"Working inside Svalbard was very difficult. I couldn't feel my fingertips after some time," he says with a grin.
It would be weeks before feeling returned to Tsivelikas's fingers. But a different feeling would linger, one of pride knowing he "was the only one privileged to enter this doomsday vault".
"It was amazing to see in front of your eyes the efforts of the people in Syria, who were pioneering in duplicating the seeds here in Svalbard," he says.
A delicate mission
It's not as simple as hopping to Svalbard, collecting seeds, defrosting them, growing them in a field and harvesting more seeds to back up your supplies. You can't re-grow a whole collection of hundreds of thousands of seeds in a year.
So when Tsivelikas returned with his precious cargo, ICARDA began what would become a decade of work. Over years, crops were grown with precision, in conditions closely monitored for pests and diseases.
Plant researcher Anna Backhaus, a postdoctoral fellow at ICARDA, describes gene banks as hoarders that allow "nature to help nature".
She spends her days identifying which of the thousands of species stored in the gene bank can be used to help produce modern crops that are more susceptible to a hotter, drier climate.
It's work that can take years — introducing new traits into plants that both allow them to better tolerate harsher conditions, while still yielding crops that can be farmed.
"The whole idea is that we want crops that are resilient, that help us to reduce the amount of pesticides we're using, that help us to reduce the amount of water we're wasting — that helps us feed a growing human population," she says.
"And all of that we can do through the magical powers of nature itself."
Michael Baum's office at ICARDA is within eyesight of the gene bank that Backhaus works in. He was among those who had to flee Syria.
"Syria used to be a very stable country and then in 2011 and 2012 the protests started," ICARDA's deputy director-general for research says.
Baum says even in Morocco, where he now lives, he is reminded how fragile stability can be.
The UN estimates about 17 per cent of Morocco's population is living in poverty, or considered vulnerable to multidimensional poverty.
The Mediterranean coastal enclave at the tip of North Africa is also highly vulnerable to climate change, with increasingly frequent and intense droughts posing an immediate threat to its agricultural sector.
The country's economic stability has been further disrupted by the global shock waves of the Russia-Ukraine war.
"So I'm worried about the situation in Morocco," Baum says. "Countries that seem very stable, in a very short period can turn around and develop problems we've seen in some of the thriving countries in this part of the world."
Lessons from Ukraine
Baum is reflecting on the precarious nature of his work as the world marks the second anniversary of the Russia-Ukraine war.
Prior to 2022, those two countries were dubbed the world's bread basket, accounting for around a third of global exports and 12 per cent of the calories traded globally.
Ukraine contributed to 6 per cent of global wheat exports, much of which went to parts of Africa and South-East Asia. Egypt alone imported about half of the Ukrainian wheat exported to Africa.
That was until Russia invaded. The early days of the war saw 20 million tonnes of Ukrainian crops ready for export held up in ports. With time, paddocks would be destroyed and one of the busiest ocean passages would become a treacherous voyage, the Black Sea littered with mines.
Loading...With no clear path to get crops out of Ukraine, it sparked fears that food-insecure and poorer nations would deteriorate further. Even countries that don't import grain from Ukraine were hit, with prices rising sharply.
Temporary deals between the warring nations, brokered by third parties to allow the flow of Ukrainian crops to markets, fell apart as the conflict dragged into a second year.
If there's anything this war has proved time and time again, it's how creativity can so often counter military might. And so it was to be with grain.
Before the invasion of Ukraine, crops would have set sail from Ukrainian port cities like Odesa, headed across the Black Sea to the Bosporus Strait, then onto the Mediterranean Sea and out to global markets.
Now, if a crop is travelling by sea, the ship hugs the coastline past Romania and Bulgaria, through the Bosporus Strait and beyond. According to the World Bank, wheat shipments can be adjusted rapidly because the crop typically travels on dry charter vessels that set sail on demand, rather than set schedules.
Alternatively, so-called solidarity lanes were established with European support to allow Ukrainian grain to head to international markets via land.
These lanes are now responsible for about 60 per cent of the country's exports and have allowed Ukraine to sell grain more easily into Europe — a controversial move in neighbouring countries where farmers have been annoyed at the competition in their domestic markets.
European Commission figures show that between May 2022 and January this year, the solidarity lanes allowed Ukraine to export 122 million tonnes of goods, while also importing 45 million tonnes of military and humanitarian aid, fuel and other products.
Despite war still raging within its boundaries, Ukraine has managed to stabilise the flow of grain exports and in January saw exports at levels not seen since before the war.
Tackling climate challenges
The ripples of this war extend far beyond the bounds of wheat.
Price hikes flowed through to global markets, sending shock waves around the world and underlining the risks of an over-reliance on foreign markets.
For some African countries, it reinforced the need for agricultural research to help them achieve greater levels of self-sufficiency.
But in a changing climate, achieving that goal is not as simple as growing more crops. The availability of land, vulnerability to extreme weather events, and access to technology are just some of the factors at play. While wealthier nations have the resources to tackle these challenges, many in this part of the world do not.
"The big issue is climate, which we are not sufficiently addressing," Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of the UK domestic spy agency MI5, recently said of the biggest issues the world is facing beyond Russia's invasion.
"It has implications for the future of our grandchildren. It has implications for food security, for water security, for wars over both, and migration on a scale, which would say we've seen nothing yet. If large parts of the world become unliveable, those who can move will do so."
It's a sentiment shared by Tadesse Degu, a principal scientist at ICARDA who oversees spring bread wheat breeding programs. He says he lives on the frontline of climate change.
"I am a living example for those who are climate change deniers because I have seen it — the disease development, the drought and heat increases," he says.
Degu, who was among those who fled Aleppo, works closely with Australian farmers and the Grains Research and Development Corporation. In return, Australia imports the wheat and barley lines he and ICARDA develop, which plant breeders turn into crops grown on farms across the country.
His goal is to help produce crops that can sustain a changing climate and help feed a growing global population — even in far-away wealthy countries like Australia.
But that work becomes harder and harder each year.
"When I arrived here in 2012 from Syria, the station was the optimum environment of Morocco. This environment used to have more than 500mm of rain on average," he says looking out over his research fields, about an hour from Rabat.
"Starting from 2019, the amount of rainfall has decreased, the temperature increased and by 2023 we had 180mm of rain. But this year, we received not more than 20mm up to [January]. That is not good enough for planting."
Veteran legume breeder and pest management expert Seid Ahmed Kemal is tasked with finding solutions in cases where the gene bank might not have the answer.
He says climate change is bringing with it new insects and diseases, while previously "minor" pests are now proving more threatening to crop yields.
Less rain and lower yields mean pests that might have attacked leaves will be less prevalent, while those that attack the roots become more pressing.
Last year, Degu was able to test drought-tolerant crops with the small amount of rain that had fallen. This year, he's facing a bleak outlook and thinks it will make efforts to tackle self-sufficiency that much harder.
Africa, he says, imports 55 million tonnes of wheat, costing tens of billions of dollars each year. Morocco, Algeria and Nigeria each import around 5 million tonnes. It's double that in Egypt.
"Because of this Russia-Ukraine crisis, even if you have the money, you don't have the place to buy it," he says.
"So because of this, most of the countries wanted to be wheat self-sufficient, to grow locally. But with the challenge of climate change, I am not sure how that is going to be achieved."
Degu does however see green shoots in other parts of Africa. Ethiopia used to import around 2 million tonnes of wheat, but last year, after embracing irrigated wheat production, it produced 12 million tonnes, making it the largest wheat producer in Africa.
Nigeria is looking to develop a similar system that uses both rain and irrigation to grow wheat in a bid to reduce their wheat imports by 50 per cent. It's a policy, Degu says, that will only work in the wealthier African countries.
Despite the challenges, he remains optimistic that science and the global sharing of knowledge and technology can help tackle global hunger.
"So, if we keep working, developing such high-yielding, climate-resilient technologies, increase the availability of food in every country, it will contribute for peace and stability," he says.
"That is my wish."
He says this as war rages in the Middle East — he's conscious that there's little he can do to change it, but knows all too well that it risks making an already hungry world hungrier.
The looming threat
To Degu's east, Bab-el-Mandeb has been living up to its name in recent months.
An Arabic name, it translates to the Gate of Grief or the Gate of Tears, depending on the interpretation.
Stretching around 30 kilometres, the gate separates Yemen in the Middle East from the Horn of Africa, neatly dividing Asia to the east and Africa to the west.
It also serves as the opening to the Red Sea, the crucial trade route that connects with the even narrower Suez Canal to the north.
Until late last year, tens of thousands of ships would pass through here annually, accounting for 12 per cent of global trade.
But the splinters of another war, this time in Gaza, threw this channel into chaos.
On November 19, Houthi rebels landed a helicopter on the British-owned Galaxy Leader. The ship had been travelling through the Red Sea from Türkiye to India.
Loading...The Houthis, an Iranian-backed group aligned with Hamas and Lebanon's Hezbollah under the Axis of Resistance, say they have targeted Israeli-linked vessels in retaliation against the war in Gaza.
The Yemen Conflict Observatory estimates the Houthis have targeted almost 80 ships in the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden since the end of last year, often using Bab el-Mandeb as the point to launch missiles and drones as ships entered the strait.
So worried about the scale of this disruption, the United States has led a global military taskforce (which Australia has joined with personnel, not warships) to try and counter the attacks.
Amid the strife, ships have re-routed, opting for a longer journey that allows them to avoid the Red Sea.
In earlier times, it would have taken just eight days for a ship to sail from Ukraine to the Horn of Africa, sailing through the Suez Canal and Red Sea.
Now, it's an extra 30 days to traverse down Africa's west coast around the Cape of Good Hope and then back up the African east coast.
A trip between the east coast of the United States and India is roughly doubled if you need to bypass the Red Sea.
The Red Sea is also a crucial passage for getting Ukraine's grain to Asia, with 30 per cent of its exports heading to China.
It's a worrying sight for Michael Baum, who fears ships bypassing the Red Sea, and more importantly the Suez Canal, could have implications not just for Egypt but the broader region.
If the Red Sea is considered narrow, the Suez is a hair-width by comparison. At just 280 metres wide, it's a crucial global shipping artery.
Handling around 10 per cent of international shipping, almost 70 ships a day passed through the Suez Canal each day in 2022. It offers a lucrative income for Egypt, which earned more than $14 billion in transit fees in 2022-23.
"The global transport through the Suez Canal is very much reduced and this is the biggest source of income for Egypt," Baum says.
"I'm very much worried that Egypt might be the next country that becomes unstable and underwritten by internal problems. There might be other countries that also follow if these regional conflicts are not managed properly."
Looking to the future
You need only look to history to see the consequences of food crises on mass migration. The protests that turned into a civil war in Syria first started in Tunisia in December 2010, where they were initially dismissed as bread riots.
Baum says the Russia-Ukraine war has exacerbated a problem the globe was already struggling to fix — despite all the efforts scientists are making to combat climate change, food insecurity is increasing.
"Over the last 10 years, there are more and more countries that have become food insecure because many countries are fragile and have wars and local conflict and there are many displaced people," he says.
"Libya, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan — these were all countries with developing economies, which are today ridden by conflicts and problems. And so, food insecurity is increasing, rather than decreasing."
But these threats are nothing new for Baum's team. When it's your job to bolster food security, it comes with a risk.
ICARDA's history is steeped in conflict — from its founding in 1975, civil war in Lebanon led the organisation instead to Syria, where the regime offered free land for it to be established. Its headquarters would eventually return to Lebanon with the upheaval of Syria's war.
A skeleton crew of local staff stayed when everyone else fled Syria. With time, they would flee too. And while ICARDA might have lost access to its original gene bank, reports suggest the employees with no means but to stay have preserved the facility, even in the face of considerable risk.
Rebuilding the genetic stockpiles hasn't been easy, but after years of hard work, ICARDA's goals in Syria have been achieved. That hasn't been the case in Afghanistan, Yemen and Iraq, where their genetic material has been lost.
After all the turmoil, the relocations, the conflicts that engulf the world around them, these scientists remain optimistic about their futures.
Athanasios Tsivelikas embodies that as much as the rest.
He doesn't need those gloves he used in Svalbard today. Where he's standing there's no chance of frostbite, if anything there's a chance of catching some sun in the middle of winter.
At his feet are green shoots of a bread wheat crop.
Back in the 1990s, the then-Syrian-based ICARDA gene bank sent duplicate copies of these seeds to Mexico to store them as a backup. These seeds were among the 17 per cent of the Syrian collection that never made it to Svalbard. That is about to change.
Once this crop is harvested, some of the seeds will enter ICARDA's Moroccan gene bank, some will go back to Mexico and others will be Svalbard-bound. It will mark a major milestone for ICARDA, with its collection set to be fully duplicated in Norway's frozen vault.
The moment isn't lost on Tsivelikas.
"We came here without seeds, without infrastructure," Tsivelikas says.
"But we have managed, as ICARDA, in a few years, to have wonderful infrastructure and we're about to reconstitute the whole collection — the feeling is amazing.
"These are not ICARDA's seeds. They are the seeds of humanity.
"They are the seeds that farmers have entrusted to us and will serve all of humanity."
Credits:
Words and photos: Brett Worthington
Design and illustration: Emma Machan
Production and editing: Lucy Sweeney
Additional photography and video: Courtesy of Crop Trust, ICARDA, Reuters and Associated Press.
Brett Worthington travelled to Morocco as the winner of the Crawford Fund Food Security Journalism Award, with the assistance of the Crawford Fund and ICARDA and financial support from DFAT's Council on Australia-Arab Relations.