On 13 October 2026, ICARDA deposited 2,039 seed samples from its Lebanon genebank into Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The material represents 177 species, including faba bean, barbed goat grass, little medick, peas, and other crops and wild relatives. The deposit followed ICARDA’s June 2026 contribution from Morocco of 1,172 samples spanning 30 species of chickpea, lentil, and cereal crops.
These accessions preserve genetic traits needed to breed crops resilient to climate change, water scarcity, pests, and disease. For lunar habitation, they provide biological options beyond a narrow crop portfolio, reducing vulnerability to pathogen emergence, environmental stress, genetic bottlenecks, and failure of Earth-based supply chains. However, seed-vault storage alone does not guarantee viability or usability: the Ark also requires controlled regeneration, genomic characterization, pollination protocols, microbial safeguards, and cultivation data for lunar conditions.
The Ark team should track ICARDA’s accession metadata, species coverage, regeneration intervals, viability testing, and trait characterization; prioritize wild relatives and drought- and salinity-tolerant lines; and design at least two geographically and operationally independent repositories, including a lunar-compatible cryogenic or low-temperature archive. The 3,211 samples deposited by ICARDA in 2026 should be treated as a model dataset for defining minimum crop-genetic coverage and restoration procedures.