This post introduces the Aotearoa NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat), and outlines the aims, methods, and results of the project. You can read a range of project blogs here.
Update Aug 2024: See our presentation to the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment on their NZ Fuel Security Study
Update Nov 2023: You can now read the Main Report for 2023 (PDF, 118 pages).
Update Oct 2023: The NZCat Webinar took place on 25 Oct. Matt presented high-level project findings followed by expert panel discussion, attended by an audience of diverse agencies.
Update Sept 2023: We have completed our interview study and report expert insights on NZ’s resilience.
Update July 2023: A list of academic papers on existential risk and nuclear war/winter produced by the project team.
Update June 2023: We have completed our survey of experts on Nuclear risk and NZ.
Update Feb 2023: We have completed our NZ and Nuclear War/Winter Workshop.
Update Jan 2023: We have produced a NZ nuclear war/winter Hazard Profile.
Why this project?
Global catastrophic risks include nuclear war, extreme pandemics, and supervolcanic eruptions, among other threats. Research, and recent experiences with disasters such as the Covid-19 pandemic and Russian invasion of Ukraine, indicate that should global catastrophes eventuate, the cascading global impacts could be severe.
The consequences could be devastating for Aotearoa NZ, plausibly making it difficult to sustain industrial society and difficult for NZ agriculture to continue producing the huge food excess which would help feed the world in a global catastrophe. This thinking runs counter to some views that ‘safe havens’ like NZ or Australia might be relatively less impacted in some global catastrophes.
The risk is that a major catastrophe disrupts climate, trade, or other global systems, to the point that industry is unable to function, leading to massive food, energy, manufacturing, and societal disruption.
The NZCat project draws inspiration from the concept of island refuges for mitigating existential risks to humanity. A suitably robust island might increase the probability that humanity survives even the greatest global catastrophes.
Project Aim
To demonstrably nudge government towards addressing these risks. Steps towards this include understanding the impact representative major global catastrophes might have on Aotearoa NZ, for example a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war. We also aim to identify the adaptive strategies and plans that might mitigate these effects, ensuring that industrial society can continue.
Project Team
The NZCat project team consists of three co-investigators plus collaborators. We will work with with Think Tanks, Academic Researchers, Policy Professionals, Industry, and the Public Sector through the 12-month duration of the project.
Dr Matt Boyd
Matt is an independent researcher who completed his PhD in philosophy. He founded Adapt Research in 2015. Matt has researched health, technology, and catastrophic risk for a decade and published over 40 peer-reviewed academic papers. His recent work has focused on national risk processes, nuclear winter, and global health security.
Professor Nick Wilson
Nick is a research professor of public health with research interests that include refuges to mitigate pandemic disease and nuclear war. Nick contributed to work for the Commission for the Future on Nuclear Disaster as far back as 1982. He has over 500 Medline-indexed research publications.
Dr Ben Payne
Ben is an experienced risk professional who completed his PhD in geography. Ben was Lead Scientific Officer with the Global Risk Research-Agenda Development Group of the UNDRR/International Science Council in producing A Framework for Global Science. He has also worked with Massey University’s Joint Centre for Disaster Research.
Sam Ragnarsson
Sam is a Principal Data and Information expert with extensive experience in working on complex national issues that rely on data and future technology. Sam has a strong background in strategic alignment, risk management, and interagency collaboration, with a focus on data interoperability and the integration of emerging technologies.
Timeline
The project began in November 2022. Initial planning days invited advice from risk professionals with established interests in global catastrophe and Aotearoa. Following planning there are four phases:
- Phase I saw us develop a National Risk Assessment Hazard Profile for a representative global catastrophe (nuclear war/nuclear winter).
- Phase II involved a workshop to validate the hazard profile, assess knowledge gaps, and design mixed method data collection using surveys and interview methodology. Some of these approaches are based on the 1987 NZ Nuclear Impacts Study.
- Phase III is where we reached out with a survey and interviews of knowledge holders across industry, the public sector and academia, including interviews. We collected data that paints a rich picture of the likely impacts of nuclear disaster on NZ society and industry, along with crowdsourced adaptive responses, mitigation strategies, and possible plans. We’ve reported the survey findings here, and blogged here.
- Phase IV involved an open webinar and expert panel discussion about findings to date, priority policy needs, and mitigation measures.
- Dissemination & Engagement through research papers, presentations, blogs, policy recommendations, and shadow Ministerial briefings continues in 2024. Check this site for updates and subscribe to our blog.
Project Goals
The goal is to generate productive discussion, concrete solution ideas, and map a pathway to ongoing and robust analysis of global catastrophic and human existential risk and its relationship to Aotearoa NZ.
Along the way we will provide submissions and policy advice to existing government initiatives, for example our submission to the Productivity Commission on global catastrophe and economic resilience was one of three consultation submissions the NZCat team has made.
We aim to connect our work in logical and, where possible, generalisable ways with catastrophe resilience work being undertaken across other island jurisdictions, with potential to leverage synergies with continental Australia, Tasmania, Indonesia, Iceland, or others, in the future. Our work exploring minimum agricultural inputs could inform many global post-catastrophe food strategies.
Adapt Research Ltd 
Hey the FIRST effect of a nuclear war in the northern hemisphere is, in New Zealand, FIRST EFFECT IS: Since the Beehive has their OWN nuclear bunker to shelter in, under there, FIRST EFFECT IS: Watch those POLITICIAN SPRINT, RUN TO THE LIFT OR STAIRS, screaming: the war is on, run, quick, do the politicians seeing this will suddenly decide that it is ESSENTIAL to take running, sprinting lessons at the Harriers Club and get FIT, exercise so they can run faster? In the Beehive, in fact, they have a lift in the building and that lift takes anyone down into a bunker, luxury they say but it does NOT seem luxury to make people happier, I think the politicians will be in this case, terrified and practice their athletics? IF a psychiatrist finds this the first thing he will think is: I should talk to the politicians and organise myself into a very, very high-paid job to supply the bunker-dwellers with antidepressant drugs. He will want also to make MONEY on that beforehand AND he will want his very own pre-booked place in the bunker too, to be the politicians expert with a large area in the bunker to store up psychiatric pills. Make it large, po9liticans, if this war starts, you will want to stay there for life, and since you just might believe that sex is so good, the woman politicians might then have baby. How are you going to feed the baby later on? Do you have enough food for 100 years supply for all the people in the bunker to keep on feeding babies and children of the future, more and more babies, how are you all meant to cope? Psychiatrists would go as usual, to their favourite subject, and it’s sex, and those people that go to bed there, will want a whore in there, too, just to past the time with their favourite hobby? Even with AIDS undetected, whom is your doctor or is he dying of radiation sickness, too? Are ALL of the doctors going to survive out there, with the rest of the population dying, slowly, agony too? Is there pain-relief medicine for radiation sickness and BURNS? Maybe. But, where to store the pills outside for the poor people trapped in the city with NO transport due to no fuels, petrol? Your vegetable gatdens: what makes people think it’s so HEALTHY to eat next years crop of severely mutated food anyway? Racks will help you in the bunker, grow veges there but if a psychiatrist makes a mistake, then their victim will die in bed after his medically proven: vegetative state. Advice: DO NOT TRUST THE PSYCHIATRISTS. By the way, the Wellington-Ferry would be full of the sick crews who by that stage, are also suicidal. The ship NEEDS the captain and crew to go anywhere. Of course, this ia nonsense and FICTION as a comedy attempt. Job anyone? Who is going to pay me in such times of that war, the WINZ staff benefit-givers are ALSO SHUT DOWN due to being short-staffed, the other staff will be running SOUTHWARD too, avoiding the fallout windblown from the North. When is the GRIM REAPER calling abound to VISIT you? Marijuana smokers, your garden is TOO SMALL to grow enough to last you for life, AND IT’S ILLEGAL. Go for it Police, you are already spying on people’s gardens, good on you. BUT: IN THIS WAR IF IT HAPPENS: The Police will run fast to the lift to your very own private luxury bunker, to be living there for life. I hope the Police like a good joke. In the bunker, the only way to cheer them up is a funny joke, because antidepressants do NOT make people laugh. TV stations all shut down so some fool in the USA, has put in there, a tv camera crew, a tv station, their very own tv station. For them to watch as billions of people die and the bunker-dwellers KNOW IT. How depressing for them. Heaven after death, is JOYFUL though, they forget ALL bad memories and news etc.
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