Living Seed and Pollinator Bank Pilot - Vantaa, Finland

In both gardens, nature and agriculture, insect pollinators play a crucial role in fertilizing flowering plants so they can mature into seeds and propagate their species. There exists in more than 20.000 bee species Worldwide and approximately 90% of these are solitary bees. The diversity of bees and flowering plants are linked as co-evolutionary and interdependent lifeforms that date back to the Cretateous period (+100 million years ago). Bee diversity, in other words, has played a crucial role in defining a landscape that has made homo-sapiens possible and who, to put things in perspective, have only inhabited Earth for a mere 250k years.

Because bees and flowering plants are codependent lifeforms, they are best kept alive in multiple and geographically dispersed living seed and pollinator banks. In the face of a catastrophic event and rampant climate change, the $21million doomsday seed vault in Svalbard (Norway) would be rendered useless without bees to pollinate and propagate fruit set and seeds. In response, we believe that a living seed and pollinator bank with native bees represents a far more efficient, substantive and engaging means of hedging the negative effects of such events, as these sites can activate local communities to engage in a transformative and collective agenda for positive change. The Vantaa pilot represents ground zero for bringing this change to fruition and is conceptualized as a distributed network of seed and pollinator banks that bring Global perspectives to monitoring and securing biodiversity and sustainable agriculture.

The Vantaa site is also home to Habeetats second experimental learning environment, that enable both youth and other interested parties to explore how climate change affect native solitary bee populations.  

The Living Seed and Pollinator Bank is a collaborative and conceptual landscape designed and realized by Habeetats and Copenhagen Seeds with support from the City of Vantaa, forumvirium and the Nordic Smart Cities Network.