The water, limited to the 15-metre entrance hall in the melt late last year, had no impact on millions of seeds of crops including rice, maize, potatoes and wheat that are stored more than 110 metres inside the mountainside.

Still, water was an unexpected problem for the vault on the Svalbard archipelago, about 1,000 km from the North Pole. It seeks to safeguard seeds from cataclysms such as nuclear war or disease in natural permafrost.

“Svalbard Global Seed Vault is facing technical improvements in connection with water intrusion,” Norwegian state construction group Statsbygg, which built the vault that opened in 2008, said in a statement on Saturday.

“The seeds in the seed vault have never been threatened.”

Spokeswoman Hege Njaa Aschim said Statsbygg had removed electrical equipment from the entrance — a source of heat — and was building waterproof walls inside and ditches outside to channel away any water.

The number of visitors would be reduced to limit human body heat, she said. Some of the water that flowed in re-froze and had to be chipped out by workers from the local fire service.

An underlying problem was that permafrost around the entrance of the vault, which had thawed from the heat of construction a decade ago, has not re-frozen as predicted by scientists, Aschim said.

Temperatures in the Arctic region have been rising at twice the global average in a quickening trend that climate scientists blame on man-made greenhouse gases. Svalbard has sometimes had rain even in the depths of winter when the sun does not rise.

“There’s no doubt that the permafrost will remain in the mountainside where the seeds are,” said Marie Haga, head of the Bonn-based Crop Trust that works with Norway to run the vault. “But we had not expected it to melt around the tunnel.”

Haga said the trust had so far raised just over $200 million towards an $850 million endowment fund to help safeguard seeds in collections around the globe (all figures US$). “That is an extremely cheap insurance policy for the world,” she said.

USC Canada, a charity supporting “ecological agriculture” and seed diversity, said in a release Friday the flooding incident “reaffirms more than ever the critical importance of keeping seed diversity in farmers’ hands.”

“It is a relief to hear that none of the seeds in the collection were harmed, but these events are far from reassuring,” USC co-executive director Martin Settle said. “Climate change has already broken through the vault’s defenses, and these are the early days of permafrost melt. In the long term, how safe are the seeds?”

While USC Canada said it “supports Svalbard as a seed bank of last resort,” USC Canada’s other co-executive director Jane Rabinowicz said “there is no single solution to conserving the genetic diversity we need to feed the planet.”

— Alister Doyle is an environment correspondent for Reuters based in Oslo. Includes files from AGCanada.com Network staff.

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Some freak weather events would have happened naturally but the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said greenhouse gas emissions had raised the risks of extreme events, sometimes by a factor of 10 or more.

“We just had the hottest five-year period on record, with 2015 claiming the title of hottest individual year. Even that record is likely to be beaten in 2016,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement.

Among the worst extremes, a 2011-12 drought and famine in the Horn of Africa killed more than 250,000 people and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines killed 7,800 in 2013, the WMO said.

Superstorm Sandy caused $67 billion of damage in 2012, mostly in the United States, it said in a report issued to a meeting of almost 200 nations in Morocco tasked with implementing a 2015 global agreement to combat climate change.

The last five-year period beat 2006-10 as the warmest such period since records began in the 19th century.

The heat was accompanied by a gradual rise in sea levels spurred by melting glaciers and ice sheets. The changes “confirmed the long-term warming trend caused by greenhouse gases,” the WMO said of the report.

And the amount of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, reached 400 parts per million in the atmosphere for the first time in records in 2015, it said.

Last year was the first in which temperatures were one degrees Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, partly because of an El Nino weather event that warmed the Pacific.

The 2015 Paris Agreement set an overriding target of limiting warming to “well below” 2 degrees C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times, ideally just 1.5 (2.7F).

But pledges so far to curb greenhouse gas emissions are too weak and put the globe on target for about 3C (5.4F), U.N. data show. The Marrakesh meeting is trying to work out ways to step up actions and write rules for the Paris Agreement.

Getting on track “means a global transformation” of the world economy to cleaner energies in sectors from energy to transport, Moroccan Environment Minister Hakima El Haite told Reuters.

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At the start of two-week talks in Morocco, many delegates wore badges with a smiling picture of the Earth to celebrate the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on Nov. 4, which seeks to phase out greenhouse gas emissions this century.

The U.S. election was not mentioned in speeches at the opening ceremonies.

Trump doubts that climate change is caused by man-made greenhouse gases, mainly from burning coal and oil, and wants to abandon the pact. His Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, by contrast, is a strong supporter of the Paris accord.

“I think we should not over-emphasise the importance of Donald Trump,” French climate ambassador Laurence Tubiana told reporters, asked about the U.S. vote.

“It would be a shock” if Trump were elected, she said. “But if it happened, on Wednesday morning you would see everyone say ‘We stick to the Paris Agreement’,” she said.

On Monday, delegates called for action to implement the Paris Agreement, which has been ratified by countries as diverse as China, Saudi Arabia and Pacific island states, as part of efforts to limit heat waves, droughts, floods and rising seas.

Moroccan Foreign Minister Salaheddine Mezouar said there had been “unrivalled progress” on climate change this year.

“Now we must build on this dynamic,” he told delegates. Average global temperatures are set to hit new highs in 2016, surpassing a 2015 record.

The talks will try to find ways to step up curbs on greenhouse gases, help African nations cope with global warming and raise climate finance for developing nations to a goal of $100 billion a year by 2020.

All countries have promised curbs on fossil fuel emissions and Marrakesh is due to start writing a “rule book”, a process likely to take two years, to lay out how they will monitor and report their greenhouse gas emissions.

Trump says President Barack Obama’s plans to cut greenhouse gases by 2025 would kill U.S. jobs and make the United States dependent on oil imports from the Middle East.

Asked about Trump at a news conference, French Environment Minister Segolene Royal said she did not want to interfere in the U.S. election but conceded she had previously expressed hope that “this great country will turn to a woman as president”.

She also noted that the Paris Agreement lays out four years of formalities before any country can withdraw.

The European Union said it would push ahead with the Paris Agreement. “Our legislation is in force regardless,” said Gabriela Fischerova, head of the EU delegation.

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Examining long-term trends for ice floating on the ocean since the 1950s, scientists in Germany and the United States projected the ocean around the North Pole would be ice-free in summers by the mid-2040s at current levels of emissions.

In the historical records, they found that every tonne of carbon dioxide emitted to the atmosphere meant on average the loss of three square metres of ice in September, when the ice reaches a minimum extent before expanding in winter.

That made it possible to “grasp the contribution of personal carbon dioxide emissions to the loss of Arctic sea ice,” scientists at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Meteorology and the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center wrote in the journal Science.

Each passenger taking a return flight from New York to Europe, or driving a gasoline car 4,000 kms, would emit about a tonne of carbon dioxide, they estimated.

A long-term retreat of Arctic sea ice is already causing profound changes, disrupting the lives of indigenous peoples while opening the region to more oil and gas exploration and shipping.

Scientists usually deal in more abstract terms such as billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases. “Here it’s more personal,” lead author Dirk Notz of the Max Planck Institute told Reuters.

Some other scientists said the study was simplistic.

“This sounds like a rather crude equation,” Peter Wadhams, a professor of ocean physics at Cambridge University, told Reuters.

He said ice could disappear from the Arctic Ocean as early as 2017 or 2018 because of other factors triggered by man-made climate change, such as shifts in winds and rising sea temperatures.

In September 2016, sea ice shrank to an annual minimum extent of 4.14 million square kilometres (1.60 million square miles), matching 2007 as the second smallest in the satellite record behind 2012.

The study said goals set under the 2015 Paris Agreement for curbing emissions were insufficient to avert the loss of ice.

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Greenhouse gas emissions from industry left their first traces in the temperatures of tropical oceans and the Arctic around 1830, researchers wrote in a recent journal article, challenging widespread views that man-made climate change began only in the 20th century.

The Industrial Revolution began around 1750 in Britain, with a surge in the use of coal to power factories, ships and railways, and gradually spread around the world.

Greenhouse gases at the time were only a fraction of those now blamed for trapping excessive levels of the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, stoking more droughts, floods, heat waves and rising sea levels.

“Our findings show that the climate can respond very quickly to changes in greenhouse gases,” lead author Nerilie Abram, of the Australian National University, told Reuters of the findings published in the journal Nature.

The scientists detected a rise in temperatures in the 19th century by studying the growth of old trees, corals, the makeup of lake sediments and air trapped in ice cores in Antarctica.

Their computer models showed that natural factors — such as changes in the sun’s energy output or the Earth’s orbit — could not fully explain the warming trend.

The rising heat only made sense when factoring in an early dose of man-made greenhouse gases, they wrote.

Previously, many scientists have reckoned a small rise in 19th century temperatures was a rebound after a sun-dimming volcanic eruption of Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.

“This is further evidence that the climate has already changed significantly since the pre-industrial period,” said Ed Hawkins, a climate scientists at Reading University who was not involved in the study.

Last year, almost 200 nations agreed at a Paris summit to shift from fossil fuels and set a goal of limiting rises in average surface temperatures to “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial times, ideally below 1.5 C.

The Paris deal does not define pre-industrial. Temperatures this year, likely to set new records, are just over 1 C above levels in the 1880s, a widely used baseline in climate science.

Abram said using a baseline of 1800 would make the Paris Agreement harder to achieve by adding perhaps 0.2 C.

“We are frighteningly close already to 1.5,” she said.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters correspondent covering environmental and climate change-related issues from Oslo.

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July was the hottest single month since records began in the 19th century, driven by greenhouse gases and an El Nino event warming the Pacific. And NASA this week cited a 99 per cent chance that 2016 will be the warmest year, ahead of 2015 and 2014.

In a welcome break, a new annual record is unlikely in 2017 since the effect of El Nino — a phenomenon that warms the eastern Pacific and can disrupt weather patterns worldwide every two to seven years — is fading.

“Next year is probably going to be cooler than 2016,” said Phil Jones of the Climatic Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia. He added there was no sign of a strong La Nina, El Nino’s opposite that can cool the planet.

In 1998, a powerful El Nino led to a record year of heat and it took until 2005 to surpass the warmth. That hiatus led some people who doubt mainstream findings that climate change has a human cause to conclude that global warming had stopped.

“If 2017 is cooler, there will probably be some climate skeptics surfing on this information,” said Jean-Noel Thepaut, head of the Copernicus Climate Change Service at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts.

“The long-term trend is towards warming but there is natural variability so there are ups and downs. The scientific community will have again to explain what is happening,” he told Reuters.

The spike in temperatures in 1998 may also have contributed for several years to reduced government attention to climate change, which has been linked to more heat waves, floods, downpours and rising sea levels.

“One thing that the scientific community needs to be careful about is that they are not gearing up for a new ‘hiatus’ event,” said Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Energy Research in Oslo.

At a Paris summit last December, governments agreed the most comprehensive plan yet to shift away from fossil fuels, setting a goal of limiting the rise in temperatures to “well below” 2 C above pre-industrial times, ideally 1.5 C.

Scientists are meeting in Geneva this week to sketch out themes for a report about the 1.5 C goal that was requested by world leaders at the summit for delivery in 2018.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters correspondent covering environmental and climate change-related issues from Oslo.

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Friday’s pledges totalling about $150 million were mainly from governments, including the U.S., Germany and Australia, and will lift the organization’s endowment fund to $300 million, it said in a statement after a pledging meeting in Washington (all figures US$).

Marie Haga, executive director of the Crop Trust, said that she hoped to attract more private sector investment to the fund, which works to preserve millions of varieties of seeds against threats such as climate change and disease.

“We don’t have a well-functioning global system for conservation of coffee,” Haga told Reuters, referring to the type of projects that require funding.

“If you’re dependent on coffee for your business, it’s a good idea to conserve coffee. If you’re dependent on citrus for your business, it’s a good idea to make sure that farmers have the right varieties to use when they produce lemons and oranges.”

The Crop Trust has started to co-operate with coffee companies, she said.

“This is an approach I want to take crop by crop,” Haga added.

She also said that the Crop Trust is working with Deutsche Bank on initiatives including a bond linked to food security.

Pledges on Friday for the Crop Diversity Endowment Fund included $60 million over five years from the United States, $27 million from Germany and $4 million from Australia, the trust said.

The trust’s main global store is its doomsday vault in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. The vault is a deep, frozen store against cataclysms such as nuclear war and has capacity to store 4.5 million varieties of crops, from wheat to coconuts.

It also runs other gene banks storing seeds around the world.

“Seeds are miracles. But it does not take a miracle to safeguard this material,” Haga said.

The long-term goal is to raise $850 million for the endowment fund.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters environment correspondent based in Oslo.

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Pesticides, loss of habitats to farms and cities, disease and climate change were among threats to about 20,000 species of bees as well as creatures such as birds, butterflies, beetles and bats that fertilize flowers by spreading pollen, it said.

“Pollinators are critical to the global economy and human health,” Zakri Abdul Hamid, chair of the 124-nation report, told Reuters of a finding that between $235 billion and $577 billion of world food output at market prices depended on pollinators (all figures US$).

The food sector provides jobs for millions of people, such as coffee pickers in Brazil, cocoa farmers in Ghana, almond growers in California or apple producers in China.

Ever-more species of pollinators are threatened, according to the study, the first by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) since it was founded in 2012. It was approved in talks in Kuala Lumpur.

IPBES is modelled on the UN panel on climate change, which advises governments on ways to tackle global warming.

“Regional and national assessments of insect pollinators indicate high levels of threat, particularly for bees and butterflies,” it said. In Europe, for instance, nine per cent of bee and butterfly species were threatened with extinction.

The study pointed to risks from pesticides such as neonicotinoids, linked to damaging effects in North America and Europe. But it said there were still many gaps in understanding the long-term impact.

“It’s definitely harmful to wild bees, and we don’t know what it means for populations over time,” Simon Potts, a co-chair of the report and professor at the University of Reading in England, told Reuters.

The study also said the impact of genetically modified crops on pollinators was still poorly understood.

And it said the amount of farm output dependent on pollination had surged by 300 per cent in the past 50 years. The western honeybee, the most widespread pollinator managed by humans, produces 1.6 million tonnes of honey every year.

Still, the outlook was not all bleak. “The good news is that a number of steps can be taken to reduce the risks,” Zakri said.

Planting strips or patches of wildflowers could attract pollinators to fields of crops, and reduced use of pesticides or a shift to organic farming could also restrict the damage.

“There are some things that individuals on the ground can do,” Potts said. Smallholder farmers in Africa could let wild plants grow on part of their land; people in cities could plant flowers in their back gardens or window boxes.

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The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

“Protecting the world’s biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km from the North Pole.

The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds — such as beans, rice and wheat — against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease.

It has more than 860,000 samples, from almost all nations. Even if the power were to fail, the vault would stay frozen and sealed for at least 200 years.

The Aleppo seed bank has kept partly functioning, including a cold storage, despite the conflict. But it was no longer able to maintain its role as a hub to grow seeds and distribute them to other nations, mainly in the Middle East.

Grethe Evjen, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry, said the seeds had been requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA). ICARDA moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war.

ICARDA wants almost 130 boxes out of 325 it had deposited in the vault, containing a total of 116,000 samples, she told Reuters. They will be sent once paperwork is completed, she said.

It would be the first withdrawal from the vault, she said. Many seeds from the Aleppo collection have traits resistant to drought, which could help breed crops to withstand climate change in dry areas from Australia to Africa.

Syria’s four-year civil war has killed an estimated 250,000 people and driven more than 11 million from their homes, with 7.6 million displaced within Syria.

— Alister Doyle is an environment correspondent for Reuters in Oslo.

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The international report, based on 90 studies in five continents, said governments should also conserve the apparently less valuable bees as they might play a bigger role in the event of environmental shocks, such as from climate change.

Many types of wild bees, which count 22,000 species worldwide, are in decline because of factors such as pesticides and habitat loss, raising uncertainty about how best to protect insects vital to human food production.

Lead author David Kleijn, of Wageningen University and Research Centre in the Netherlands, said bees were like soccer players.

“There are a few who really make a lot of money, like (Cristiano) Ronaldo and (Lionel) Messi, then another large group who can make a living from football. And then there’s 99.9 per cent who just play for fun,” he told Reuters.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, said just two per cent of species, usually the most common such as bumblebees or solitary bees, did almost 80 per cent of the work by wild bees in pollinating crops such as potatoes, beans or apples.

The report, examining wild bees rather than managed honey bees kept in hives, said farmers could easily attract the best wild insect pollinators by planting wild flowers or strips of grass alongside their crops.

“It should be helpful to farmers to know that the simple and cheap measures can give them what they need for pollination,” said Pat Wilmer of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews, who was not among the authors.

The study estimated that wild bees’ work contributed more than US$3,000 per hectare in helping to produce crops, comparable to the economic value of managed honey bees.

The most industrious wild species was the North American bumble bee, with work worth US$963 a hectare, it said.

One study in 2008 estimated that insect pollination, mainly by bees, is worth 153 billion euros a year for human crop production.

But the authors said purely economic arguments about the current value of bees would wrongly overlook many species.

“We need a large and diverse group of species on the substitutes’ bench,” said Simon Potts, a co-author at the University of Reading.

— Alister Doyle is a Reuters correspondent covering environmental and climate change issues from Oslo.

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