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All human life,

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all life, depends on plants.

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Let me try to convince you of that in a few seconds.

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Just think for a moment.

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It doesn't matter whether you live in a small African village,

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or you live in a big city,

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everything comes back to plants in the end:

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whether it's for the food, the medicine,

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the fuel, the construction, the clothing, all the obvious things;

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or whether it's for the spiritual and recreational things

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that matter to us so much;

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or whether it's soil formation,

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or the effect on the atmosphere,

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or primary production.

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Damn it, even the books here are made out of plants.

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All these things, they come back to plants.

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And without them we wouldn't be here.

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Now plants are under threat.

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They're under threat because of changing climate.

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And they are also under threat because they are sharing a planet

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with people like us.

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And people like us want to do things that destroy plants,

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and their habitats.

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And whether that's because of food production,

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or because of the introduction of alien plants

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into places that they really oughtn't be,

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or because of habitats being used for other purposes --

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all these things are meaning that plants have to adapt,

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or die, or move.

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And plants sometimes find it rather difficult to move

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because there might be cities and other things in the way.

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So if all human life depends on plants,

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doesn't it make sense that perhaps we should try to save them?

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I think it does.

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And I want to tell you about a project to save plants.

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And the way that you save plants

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is by storing seeds.

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Because seeds, in all their diverse glory,

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are plants' futures.

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All the genetic information for future generations of plants

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are held in seeds.

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So here is the building;

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it looks rather unassuming, really.

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But it goes down below ground many stories.

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And it's the largest seed bank in the world.

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It exists not only in southern England,

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but distributed around the world. I'll come to that.

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This is a nuclear-proof facility.

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God forbid that it should have to withstand that.

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So if you're going to build a seed bank, you have to decide

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what you're going to store in it. Right?

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And we decided that what we want to store first of all,

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are the species that are most under threat.

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And those are the dry land species.

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So first of all we did deals

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with 50 different countries.

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It means negotiating with heads of state,

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and with secretaries of state in 50 countries

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to sign treaties.

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We have 120 partner institutions all over the world,

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in all those countries colored orange.

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People come from all over the world to learn,

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and then they go away and plan exactly how

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they're going to collect these seeds.

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They have thousands of people all over the world

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tagging places where those plants are said to exist.

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They search for them. They find them in flower.

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And they go back when their seeds have arrived.

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And they collect the seeds. All over the world.

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The seeds -- some of if is very untechnical.

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You kind of shovel them all in to bags and dry them off.

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You label them. You do some high-tech things here and there,

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some low-tech things here and there.

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And the main thing is that you have to dry them

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very carefully, at low temperature.

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And then you have to store them

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at about minus 20 degrees C --

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that's about minus four Fahrenheit, I think --

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with a very critically low moisture content.

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And these seeds will be able to germinate,

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we believe, with many of the species,

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in thousands of years,

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and certainly in hundreds of years.

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It's no good storing the seeds if you don't know they're still viable.

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So every 10 years we do germination tests

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on every sample of seeds that we have.

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And this is a distributed network.

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So all around the world people are doing the same thing.

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And that enables us to develop germination protocols.

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That means that we know the right combination of heat

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and cold and the cycles that you have to get

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to make the seed germinate.

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And that is very useful information.

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And then we grow these things,

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and we tell people, back in the countries where these seeds have come from,

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"Look, actually we're not just storing this

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to get the seeds later,

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but we can give you this information about

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how to germinate these difficult plants."

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And that's already happening.

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So where have we got to?

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I am pleased to unveil that our three billionth seed --

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that's three thousand millionth seed --

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is now stored.

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Ten percent of all plant species on the planet,

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24,000 species are safe;

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30,000 species, if we get the funding, by next year.

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Twenty-five percent of all the world's plants, by 2020.

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These are not just crop plants,

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as you might have seen stored in Svalbard in Norway --

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fantastic work there.

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This is at least 100 times bigger.

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We have thousands of collections that have been sent out

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all over the world:

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drought-tolerant forest species sent to Pakistan and Egypt;

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especially photosynthetic-efficient plants

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come here to the United States;

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salt-tolerant pasture species sent to Australia;

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the list goes on and on.

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These seeds are used for restoration.

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So in habitats that have already been damaged,

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like the tall grass prairie here in the USA,

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or in mined land in various countries,

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restoration is already happening because of these species --

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and because of this collection.

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Some of these plants, like the ones on the bottom

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to the left of your screen,

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they are down to the last few remaining members.

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The one where the guy is collecting seeds there on the truck,

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that is down to about 30 last remaining trees.

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Fantastically useful plant,

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both for protein and for medicine.

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We have training going on in China, in the USA,

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and many other countries.

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How much does it cost?

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2,800 dollars per species is the average.

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I think that's cheap, at the price.

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And that gets you all the scientific data

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that goes with it.

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The future research is "How can we find

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the genetic and molecular markers

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for the viability of seeds,

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without having to plant them every 10 years?"

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And we're almost there.

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Thank you very much.

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(Applause)