Surveying Survival: What Experts Think About New Zealand’s Resilience to Nuclear Winter

By Matt Boyd, Ben Payne, Nick Wilson

To hedge against major global catastrophe such as nuclear war/winter, New Zealand needs to invest in planning. We need resilience infrastructure as well as resilient infrastructure – there is an important distinction. Preparation would also help reduce climate emissions and mitigate a range of other risks. The following post details results of our expert survey (full report here).

Summary/TLDR:

• Global catastrophic risks such as nuclear war threaten the collapse of civilisation but mitigation is possible.
• The NZCat Project seeks to understand the impact of global catastrophe on Aotearoa/New Zealand (NZ) and develop a policy agenda for strengthening societal resilience.
• We present preliminary results from our scenario-based ‘NZ Surviving Nuclear Winter’ survey of expert stakeholders.
• Respondents thought that nuclear war could cause global supply chain disruptions, severe energy crises, and transport, digital, and socioeconomic instability in NZ.
• Agriculture and food production could face massive disruptions due to fuel and fertilizer shortages, along with the collapse of export markets.
• Energy supply might be heavily impacted by a downturn in fossil fuel trade, with problems for transport and managing peak electricity demands.
• Critical infrastructure in transport, supply chains, and ICT/digital services could fail, disrupting logistics, banking, and data management systems.
• Respondents recommended all-of-government preparedness, self-sufficiency roadmaps, rationing plans, resilient agricultural practices, diversified electricity generation, and onshore data/cloud capability development.
• Participants advocated a revised National Fuel Plan, a National Food Security Strategy, an Energy Resilience Strategy, a National Digital Communications Infrastructure Plan, and a Digital Communications Continuity Plan, among other recommendations.
• The long form post below details some of the concrete actions respondents proposed would help build NZ’s resilience to global catastrophe.
• Many resilience measures against a nuclear war/winter catastrophe would also have climate emission reduction co-benefits.
• The National Infrastructure Action Plan is a lever for investment in critical infrastructure. However, critical infrastructure needs to be effectively defined in legislation.
• Finally, this post describes the next steps in our NZCat resilience project, which will culminate in publication of a Policy Agenda in November 2023.

Introduction

Could Aotearoa/NZ build resilience to the impact of a major Northern Hemisphere nuclear war? What responses might be needed after the fact? And would anticipatory investment in resilience measures also help mitigate other catastrophes? These are some of the questions the Aotearoa/New Zealand Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat) seeks to answer.

In this post we present preliminary results from our ‘NZ Surviving Nuclear Winter’ survey of stakeholders. The ideas are those proposed by survey respondents rather than our project team. This high-level summary is illustrated with many direct quotes from respondents below.

The survey

We developed a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war/winter Hazard Profile for New Zealand. We validated the scenario at a Workshop in February 2023 attended by 20 multidisciplinary stakeholders from industry, academia, and the public sector.

Workshop participants rated the scenario ‘quite plausible’ on a formal likelihood scale. The monetized impact on NZ was agreed to be upwards of NZ$1 trillion.

We used the Hazard Profile to develop a scenario-based survey. Respondents read the scenario and answered seven free text questions about the impact of the scenario on NZ and potential mitigation measures.

We received and analysed detailed responses from 42 individuals, comprising nearly 20,000 words of text. Participants represented the sectors of agriculture, energy, transport, ICT/digital, economy/finance, manufacturing, and supply chain.

The respondents worked in the public sector, academia, industry, and think tanks. Individual respondents included farmers, risk experts, policy directors, principal advisors, CEOs, economists, technologists, and others.  

The following box summarises the scenario put to survey participants:

Survey results

What follows is a high-level summary of the ideas put forward by survey respondents. A table collating the results can be downloaded here. We’ve arranged the results by major sector, with an ‘overall’ section first. The Figure at the top of this post summarises the findings.

Overall impacts of nuclear war

Qualitative responses from the surveyed experts, indicated the following possible impacts of nuclear war on New Zealand as a non-combatant nation:

• Global supply chain disruption affecting the availability of essential goods.
• Severe energy crisis due to panic-buying and rationing of liquid fuels, reduced solar efficiency due to stratospheric soot, disruption of thermal peaking support (electricity supply at times of peak demand), and dependence on coal stockpiles and domestic gas.
• Cyber disruption due to potential loss of non-local data backups, internet access, and increased global cyberattacks.
• Transport disruption due to reduced availability of petrol/diesel and potential breakdown of communications/coordination due to internet disruption.
• Breakdown of critical services and technology infrastructure due to loss of connectivity and equipment.
• Economic impacts including elimination of foreign borrowing and debt, loss of central electronic banking and transactions, and logistical challenges in trading NZ’s surplus food for essential goods.
• Widespread food insecurity due to disrupted fresh food supplies and halted agricultural exports.
• Inability to source raw materials for manufacturing.
• Socioeconomic instability due to job loss, financial system failure, and disrupted healthcare and waste services.

Agriculture & food

The surveyed experts indicated that NZ agriculture would be massively disrupted by a shortage of liquid fuel, difficulty obtaining NPK fertilisers, and scarcity of agrichemicals such as pesticides. This would cause decreased agricultural yields compounded by cooling temperatures, and the collapse of incomes due to loss of export markets. Shortages of animal feed, veterinary products and a temporary glut of milk and animal products might necessitate an animal welfare crisis and mass culling. Cascading effects could crash the NZ economy.

One survey respondent summed up the potential agricultural impacts in saying that we:

“Would need to stop seed production for non-essential crops, change rotations to essential food production. Pool resources and machinery for localised groups, to increase efficiencies and productivity, and pool spare parts to focus on keeping a few machines running. Focus on harvesting required produce, and on [the] most productive land. Marginal land for production would be left fallow – potential to increase extensive sheep and beef production.”

Had there been no preparation, the necessary pivot of export products to the domestic market, and transition to more frost resistant crops, planting canola for biofuel (if enough processing capacity could be improvised), and switching from dairy to beef, would make for a wild ride. Such a pivot would only be possible with anticipatory seed stock, and optimisation of arable land use, eg for wheat and canola to address NZ’s current grain and liquid fuel shortfall.

Survey responses stated that, ideally, preparations for resilience would include a crop substitution plan, sustainable agricultural practices requiring less agrichemical and energy inputs, strategic use of productive land near urban areas, seed and fertiliser stockpiles, and biofuel subsidies and processing incentives.

Regulation might be optimised to encourage resilient on-farm hydroelectric schemes, permit farm-to-local food sales, short distribution chains, and diversification to supply NZ supermarkets rather than rely on imports. Such anticipatory resilience could be enacted by community-led regional resilience leadership structures detailing a roadmap to food security.

One survey respondent suggested that:

“A working group to develop a food security strategy would enable these issues to be properly considered, investigated and responses planned.”

Energy

Survey respondents indicated that energy supply in NZ could be severely impacted following a nuclear war, largely due to a downturn in trade of fossil fuels. Obtaining fuel for transportation would be a major problem, and there could be difficulties with thermal peaking support unless major electricity users like aluminium smelting, steel production and export food processing are wound down.

One respondent believed that:

“The key challenge is thermal peaking support. This is currently provided by a combination of imported coal and domestically produced gas. Import disruption means we will need to eat into our coalstockpile at Huntly (about 1 million tonnes), [the] question is whether trade with Indonesia resumes before this is exhausted; or NZ coal supply is redirected to thermal generation.”

Had there been no preparation then the current National Fuel Plan would be activated, however agricultural machinery is not explicitly prioritised in the existing plan, nor does the plan express calculations of minimum required fuel volumes for producing enough crops/other food for feeding all NZ citizens.

Survey responses stated that preparation to mitigate a major catastrophe severely impacting trade might include a revised National Fuel Plan that explicitly addresses such a severe and protracted scenario including curtailment of non-essential uses, the development and diversification of more distributed electricity generation (such as rooftop solar, on-farm micro-hydro, or wind generation), as well as increased biofuel production resilience measures.

A conversion plant to turn brown coal into diesel was suggested, though other respondents favoured converting existing food oil refineries to biodiesel production, and coal to diesel has other potentially undesirable effects. Coal could be mined and stockpiled rather than burned or turned into diesel.

Various survey responses included the following:

“Build more micro-hydro (on farm hydro), regulation notwithstanding. With a lack of fuel, electricity will be the main supply of energy and may well be constrained. Regulation which is more permissive of micro-hydro would enable these systems to be installed ahead of such a scenario.”

“We are concentrating energy demand toward electricity – this exposes us to physical threats/hazard to the above-ground infrastructure. Maintaining gas, coal, [and] liquid fossil fuels gives us optionality. It was LPG tanks that kept people fed when Cyclone Gabrielle knocked out power.”

Transport & supply

Survey responses suggested that beyond fuel shortages (see above), a core problem in transport (and other sectors) might be absenteeism, with workers prioritising family resilience over sector needs. International shipping could be completely absent, given NZ’s remoteness and the pressing needs in other regions. Fuel rationing would be essential, and the transport sector could grind to a complete halt.

As one respondent put it:

“I do not think that the transport sector in New Zealand is at all well equipped to organise itself in the absence of internet and ‘usual’ government processes.”

Survey participants suggested preparations to mitigate catastrophic impacts on transport in such a scenario. These included acquiring more coastal shipping assets and upgrading ports, electrification of rail and road transportation, and community-centric transport planning that focuses on equity of access to essential services rather than volumes of throughput on main arteries.

Regional and local councils could produce crisis management plans that ensure local food can meet local needs given local transport constraints. However, it was noted that local bodies need to be given ‘the book’ explaining how to do this and writing and disseminating ‘the book’ and associated risk information might be a task for central government.

One respondent highlighted the need to:

“Require regional councils to plan for provision of sufficient local production of food and transport of that food to sustain the population of the region including protection of needed rural land from urban development.”

ICT/Digital

Expert survey respondents identified several critical impacts on the ICT/digital sector in the scenario of a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war, mostly stemming from destroyed international infrastructure. Impacts potentially include no access to payment systems, difficulties coordinating logistics and supply, failed payroll, offline databases, and other impaired cloud-based functionality, as well as inability to source computer equipment, potential cyberattacks, and inability to access information needed to support a pivot to new ways of doing things.

One survey respondent stated:

“A major existential threat in my opinion is the lack of critical knowledge… we are primates, completely reliant on the natural world. We do not need this knowledge right now because of the fragile systems we have built around ourselves… However, if this fragile system becomes damaged, we are very quickly reduced back to primates.”

Without preparations respondents noted a range of possible actions including the prioritisation of a national communications system for coordination and rationing, and re-allocation of all working computing/cloud systems to support core functions and services.

However, respondents felt that without preparation for this kind of scenario:

“Even if we could fire up all our critical systems on NZ infrastructure in the aftermath of this scenario, we don’t have anywhere near enough of it, and wouldn’t have any way of buying or building more. It would be like trying to run ANZ Bank on a single PC – laughably impossible.”

Participants suggested preparations to mitigate these catastrophic impacts include ensuring critical knowledge exists in offline format (eg in resilience sections in libraries), incentivising and accelerating onshore data/cloud capability so NZ utilities can run independently, legislating to require essential data onshore including requirements that systems such as banking can operate without offshore connections, and encouraging businesses to understand where their data is physically stored.

NZ could also:

“Put in place coordinated national ‘Digital Communications Continuity Plan’ which provides onshore fallback for core communications, payments, government, food distribution and internet services. Run exercises where every business needs to be able to operate and rapidly stand up a ‘Minimum Viable Digital Footprint’ onshore.”

However, there is a risk that in NZ:

“We are also very much in danger of simply not having enough people that understand what they are using… most organisations have little to no expertise inhouse… what is taken care of within NZ, is usually in the hands of few experts in companies like DATACOM.”

Respondents thought we should identify cloud compute as critical national infrastructure. Catastrophic scenarios such as this could be included in a National Digital Communications Infrastructure Plan, while maintaining standard national broadcast capability based on short and long-wave radio as well as ensuring receivers exist. Finally, we could expand and maintain a capable digital/ICT workforce.

General features of this global catastrophe

Energy supply, transportation, and ICT/digital services support agriculture and food production, and are essential for the functioning of the present economy (see Figure above). With economic collapse and agricultural disarray society would struggle to cohere.

Key to mitigating this kind of scenario appears to be an all-of-government analysis and approach, development of a relative self-sufficiency roadmap, anticipated and considered rationing of essential supplies, a sector-by-sector and coordinated response plan, and a multi-term bipartisan approach to resilience that supports community-led resilience initiatives, with approximations of regional self-sufficiency in the face of major disruptions to physical and digital connectivity.

Survey participants thought that more risk information would be useful:

“I think an overall plan of action would be the best tool. If we all had a website to go to already where everyone can read up on what we can do to prepare and be resilient, but also as a place where we would be able to read what would happen first in case of disaster would be the best thing ever. So, nuclear war happens, what should I do -> Go here!…..www…. Then there one can read as to what is happening at governance level, and local level, and what each person should be doing or planning at that stage. It would say like ‘The country is now at Level 2, and this emergency protocols have been put in place – please download the following in case the internet goes down’.”

However, the potential impacts to connectivity (transport and communication) mean that preparing the conditions for resilience ahead of a catastrophe of this scale could be more important than coordinating a response after the fact (something that may not be possible).

One respondent said:

“While there is some proactive work being done to increase readiness for an event (although not on this scale), much of the work is focused on how to react. There are two weaknesses here: response for this particular event isn’t really being planned (as far as I’m aware) and also given the scale of the event a reactive approach is going to be far less effective than usual.”

Either way, re-establishing trade will be critical to survival, and survey respondents noted that this would be easier if infrastructure, relationships, and agreements are put in place ahead of a catastrophe. The Te Aoutanga Aotearoa Southern Link trade initiative was cited as a concrete potential example of such preparation.

A preliminary Policy Agenda for resilience to nuclear winter catastrophe

The results of our survey are only one component of our wider project, and more detailed and synthesised analysis will be presented in our final reports. However current results already point towards elements of a NZ policy agenda for building resilience to catastrophic risk:

1. Take an all-of-government approach, with an accountable individual coordinating catastrophic risk analysis and prioritisation.
2. Include major catastrophe scenarios, such as that described in our Hazard Profile (as well as others pertaining to severe pandemic, volcanic winter, great power war, etc) in existing resilience plans such as the National Fuel Plan.
3. Develop policies focused on laying the groundwork for structural resilience, rather than investment only in response capabilities.
4. Develop a National Food Security Strategy, including:
   • A roadmap for pivoting to regional relative self-sufficiency (if trade/transport collapse).
   • An ‘Abrupt Sunlight Reduction Scenario’ Agricultural Response Plan (to hedge against both nuclear winter and a volcanic winter).
   • An agricultural fuel plan (covering both rationing and fuel production) for ensuring agricultural machinery, transport and processing can continue in a no-trade scenario, for several years, especially after stored diesel begins to degrade.
5. Develop a National Energy Resilience Strategy that covers:
   • A plan to accelerate the development of distributed electricity generation and identify where demand reduction can occur.
   • A plan to roll out electrified agricultural machinery.
   • A plan to provide more liquid fuels produced in NZ (eg, biodiesel).
   • A plan to maintain energy infrastructure in the absence of trade in components or expertise.
6. Develop a National Digital Communications Infrastructure Plan and Digital Communications Continuity Plan.
7. Develop resilience-enabling legislation (eg, that mandates systematic analysis of catastrophic risks [as per recent USA legislation], encourages and facilitates energy diversification, supports produce supply from local farm to local community, encourages fuel storage, and supports onshore data systems as critical infrastructure).
8. Define critical infrastructure to include all the underpinnings of essential services, for example, fertiliser and seed stockpiles for frost-resistant cropping, alternative fuel production systems, and onshore digital services. This is resilience infrastructure.
9. Support the preconditions for re-establishing trade (eg, port upgrades, shipping infrastructure, trusted and diversified regional trading partners).

Preparing for nuclear winter catastrophe is good for climate and other risks

But wait there’s more. Many of the strategies identified by our survey respondents could increase food security generally, hedge against any potential trends to deglobalization and increasing regionalism, and most of them appear to help reduce climate emissions. Accelerating many key climate investments would also mitigate the harm from a global catastrophe, and vice versa.

Additionally, such resilience measures would also help mitigate harm from massive climate-altering volcanic eruptions, industry disabling solar storms, great power conflicts (such as an escalation of the war in Ukraine or a war over Taiwan), catastrophic cyberattacks that might be facilitated by advancing AI systems, or extreme pandemics that force widespread border closures.

Next Steps

We will soon produce a report on this survey to guide a multi-stakeholder online panel discussion and webinar. The aim is to finalise a list of knowledge holders to interview so we can drill into these preliminary results and suggestions, seeking practical implications.

Finally, we will consolidate all our research on this scenario and report in depth on the combined Hazard Profile, workshop, survey results, interview analysis and our desktop review of documents. This report will contain a suggested policy agenda and key action points and will be published in November 2023.

Moving forward, the key, as with all investment, will be to prioritise actions that have the broadest benefit, the best bang for buck, and provide the most resilience. Cost-benefit analysis of resilience interventions will be essential. NZ could perhaps learn from recently proposed US government cost-benefit analysis requirements that propose reducing the discount rate to 1.7%, with a declining long-term discount rate schedule (thereby more appropriately valuing the future), using analysis timeframes long enough to include all likely benefits/costs (including to future generations), and spatial scope that must consider global externalities, and favours risk aversion across uncertainty.

Benefits need to be correctly calculated, societal collapse is a massive loss and even when the likelihood of a catastrophe like prolonged trade isolation is low, this may still sway the expected value in favour of action to increase resilience.

One approach would be for 1% of the public costs of major infrastructure plans such as the electric arc furnace at Glenbrook Steel Mill to be invested in the sort of planning detailed above.

We note that the findings of our survey have some overlap with the New Zealand Infrastructure Action Plan 2023. We commend the initial steps detailed therein. However, we argue that elements of the Action Plan, such as the proposed Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, or the NZ Productivity Commission Inquiry into Economic Resilience to Supply Chain Disruption, or the DPMC & NEMAs forthcoming work on definition and legislation underpinning critical infrastructure, should all see resilience through a global catastrophe lens, and then include scenarios such as these in their analysis and planning.

This post has presented a snapshot from our survey. More information was received about the impact on the economy, social cohesion, governance, and other domains. We will report on many of these other variables in our final project publications.

There is a need for government to foster transparency and two-way communication about risk and resilience, to “provide the book” as one survey respondent put it, and “build an expectation” about what major global catastrophe means in practice, should one ever transpire.