Rumtin, I think Jack is absolutely right, and our research, in the process of being written up will argue Australia is the most likely successful persisting hub of complexity in a range of nuclear war scenarios. We include a detailed case study of New Zealand (because of familiarity with the issues) but a detailed case study of Australia is begging to be done. There are key issues (mostly focused around trade, energy forms, societal cohesion, infectious disease resilience, awareness of the main risks—not ‘radiation’ like many public think, and for Australia not climate impacts or food either, which is where most nuclear impact research has focused) that could be improved ahead of time, with co-benefits for climate impact, health, resilience to other catastrophes etc. Australia is indeed uniquely positioned here (for a number of reasons that go beyond ‘survival’ and into ‘resilience’ and ‘reboot’ capacity, etc) and policy should include interconnections with NZ policy (sustaining regional trade, security alliance, etc, we’ve identified other potentially surviving/thriving regional partners too) Happy to collaborate on this. I can send you a draft of our paper in maybe 2 weeks.
I am a bit late to the party here but I agree that Australia is uniquely well positioned to have an impact on nuclear through increasing it’s resilience and warrants its own case study. The Island state refuge concept was discussed at EAGx Australia as a potential moonshot project. On top of this major new industries relevant to food security in an Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario such as Macroalgae (See seaweed blueprint and Marine Bioproducts Cooperative Research Council) are being set up and scaling so there may be potential to influence the industry towards resilience / response through policy mechanisms e.g. minimizing tight environmental controls for seaweed farming in an ASRS.
If you end up going ahead with the Australia case study I am happy to help on the assessment of food security and infrastructure resilience aspect.
Hi Ross, here’s the paper that I mentioned in my comment above (this pre-print uses some data from Xia et al 2022 in its preprint form, and their paper has just been published in Nature Food with some slightly updated numbers, so we’ll update our own once the peer review comes back, but the conclusions etc won’t change): https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1927222/v1
We’re now starting a ‘NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project’ to more fully work up the skeleton details that are listed in Supplementary Table S1 of our paper. Engaging with public sector, industry, academia etc. Australia could do exactly the same.
Rumtin, I think Jack is absolutely right, and our research, in the process of being written up will argue Australia is the most likely successful persisting hub of complexity in a range of nuclear war scenarios. We include a detailed case study of New Zealand (because of familiarity with the issues) but a detailed case study of Australia is begging to be done. There are key issues (mostly focused around trade, energy forms, societal cohesion, infectious disease resilience, awareness of the main risks—not ‘radiation’ like many public think, and for Australia not climate impacts or food either, which is where most nuclear impact research has focused) that could be improved ahead of time, with co-benefits for climate impact, health, resilience to other catastrophes etc. Australia is indeed uniquely positioned here (for a number of reasons that go beyond ‘survival’ and into ‘resilience’ and ‘reboot’ capacity, etc) and policy should include interconnections with NZ policy (sustaining regional trade, security alliance, etc, we’ve identified other potentially surviving/thriving regional partners too) Happy to collaborate on this. I can send you a draft of our paper in maybe 2 weeks.
I am a bit late to the party here but I agree that Australia is uniquely well positioned to have an impact on nuclear through increasing it’s resilience and warrants its own case study. The Island state refuge concept was discussed at EAGx Australia as a potential moonshot project. On top of this major new industries relevant to food security in an Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario such as Macroalgae (See seaweed blueprint and Marine Bioproducts Cooperative Research Council) are being set up and scaling so there may be potential to influence the industry towards resilience / response through policy mechanisms e.g. minimizing tight environmental controls for seaweed farming in an ASRS.
If you end up going ahead with the Australia case study I am happy to help on the assessment of food security and infrastructure resilience aspect.
Hi Ross, here’s the paper that I mentioned in my comment above (this pre-print uses some data from Xia et al 2022 in its preprint form, and their paper has just been published in Nature Food with some slightly updated numbers, so we’ll update our own once the peer review comes back, but the conclusions etc won’t change): https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1927222/v1
We’re now starting a ‘NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project’ to more fully work up the skeleton details that are listed in Supplementary Table S1 of our paper. Engaging with public sector, industry, academia etc. Australia could do exactly the same.
Note that in the Xia paper, NZ’s food availability is vastly underestimated due to quirks of the UNFAO dataset. For an estimate of NZ’s export calories see our paper here: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.05.13.22275065v1
And we’ve posted here on the Forum about all this here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/7arEfmLBX2donjJyn/islands-nuclear-winter-and-trade-disruption-as-a-human