Our Project – Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting and Preparing Crop Wild Relatives — was launched in 2011 with US$50 million in funding from the Government of Norway over a planned ten-year duration. Managed by the Global Crop Diversity Trust (Crop Trust) with the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, the Project implemented in partnership with national and international genebanks and plant breeding programs around the world. Partners in the collecting and pre-breeding activities are shown in the website’s Interactive Map.
The Global Crop Diversity Trust
The Global Crop Diversity Trust is an international organization working to safeguard and promote the use of crop diversity. The Crop Trust is building an endowment fund to finance the conservation of the most important crop diversity held in genebanks around the world on a permanent basis. In addition, the organization helps to operate the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a back-up for global crop diversity and is developing information systems that promote the efficient use of crop diversity in breeding. The Crop Trust is based in Bonn, Germany.
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a world-famous scientific organization, internationally respected for its outstanding living collection of plants and world-class herbarium, as well as its scientific expertise in plant diversity, conservation and sustainable development in the UK and around the world. Kew was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in July 2003 and celebrated its 250th anniversary in 2009. Wakehurst Place is home to Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank, the largest seed bank for wild plants in the world, and hub of the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership. In 2010, the Millennium Seed Bank Partnership celebrated collecting, banking and conserving 10% of the world’s plant species. A collection program to conserve a further 15% of the world’s plant species by 2020 is well underway. By 2020, some 75,000 species will be stored in the Millennium Seed Bank and in partner seed bank facilities around the world, representing 25% of known and bankable seed plants.
The Project team
In addition to the lead partners, the University of Birmingham, UK and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Cali, Colombia also played important roles in the initial research phase of the Project. They developed a global inventory of crop wild relatives and completed a gap analysis to prioritize which CWR to prioritise for collecting, from which parts of the world.
The Project is also collaborating with collectors and pre-breeders in many countries. A list of all these Project partners can be found on our Interactive Map.
