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.
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