Ideas Blog

(15 min long-read)

TLDR/Summary

• Analysis of ten songs spanning six decades illustrates popular music’s sustained and often prescient engagement with global catastrophic risk (GCR), frequently anticipating threats before policy communities formally named them.
• Risk domains covered include nuclear war (accidental and intentional), biotechnology trajectory risk, AI alignment, epistemic collapse, Moloch-style coordination failure, environmental catastrophe, polycrisis, and civilisational decline.
• Where cinema functions as a sentinel, watching and occasionally warning in specific terms, popular music acts as a barometer, registering shifts in collective mood from fear to anger to resignation, often ahead of public or policy discourse.
• A clear tonal trajectory emerges across the collection: from Bob Dylan’s moral urgency in 1962, through Cold War alarm, to the compounding resignation of the 2020s, a drift that is not merely artistic, but empirically measurable across millions of songs.
• Key GCR lessons recur across the collection: catastrophe typically arises from misalignment and accident rather than intent; early warning is consistently present and consistently ignored; and fatalism is not just a cultural mood but a risk multiplier.
• Music’s historical capacity to build new constituencies for action, exemplified by Nena’s near-universal 1983 reach with “99 Luftballons,” has weakened as algorithmic fragmentation means protest music now energises the already-convinced rather than crossing the gap to those who are not.
• The mismatch between rising catastrophic risk and fragmenting cultural coordination mechanisms may itself be a key dimension of the problem of global risk.

Introduction

In 2025, I examined what 12 critically acclaimed films could teach us about global catastrophic risks. Cinema, it turned out, had a great deal to say. WarGames and The Day After were even credited with influencing Reagan-era arms control policy.

But music touches similar themes, and often more viscerally. Where film requires a two-hour investment and a darkened room, a three-minute song can lodge itself in collective consciousness for decades.

Here I take the same approach as the cinema piece: a curated list of songs, an attempt to extract GCR-relevant lessons from each work, and some reflection on what the collection as a whole reveals.

The selection is necessarily subjective. The dominance of rock and art-rock may itself say something about which musical subcultures have engaged most explicitly with existential themes. The picture that emerges is striking, and rather bleak.

The Songs

Bob Dylan: “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” (1962) | Generalised collapse

Written in the shadow of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Dylan gives us early warning of global catastrophe and our moral obligation to prevent it. “Hard rain” with its surreal catalogue of poisoned waters, dead forests, and suffering humanity functions as a broad-spectrum warning about civilisational recklessness and the multi-domain impact of global catastrophe. The song has much in common with the film The Road in last year’s films blog, with its nameless threat and cascading consequences.

Though clearly written in the nuclear shadow, “hard rain” does not have to be read as a single event but an accumulation, a reckoning that follows from moral failure across many domains simultaneously. The song is a pessimistic bearing witness of human trajectories but insistent on the moral duty of testimony. Someone has seen the consequences; someone must speak.

In GCR terms, this maps onto the challenge of communicating low-probability, high-impact risks to the public and policymakers. Dylan’s imagery, “the executioner’s face is always well hidden” anticipates how catastrophic risk is often driven by opaque incentives and dark structural forces rather than visible villains.

Zager and Evans: “In the Year 2525” (1969) | Biotechnology and trajectory risk

Both a major number one hit, and a remarkably prescient survey of where biotechnology, automation, and genetic enhancement might lead over time, with each verse advancing the degree of human self-modification until nothing recognisably human remains, “your legs got nothing to do, some machine’s doing that for you.”

More than 35 years before Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity”, this song sits squarely in the long-termism and transhumanist camps of global catastrophic and existential risk studies. The listener appreciates the inter-generational risk horizon stemming from unbridled technological advance.

The song evokes a degree of repulsion for the imagined future, and under present day interpretation sits as a criticism of the e/acc community and technological progress without ethical restraint.

The tone is deterministic in a way that contemporary biosafety researchers might find both familiar and uncomfortable, the trajectory all the way to, “now man’s reign is through” seems locked in from the start.

It is striking that three years before the seminal Limits to Growth study raised similar concerns about resource exploitation, Zager and Evans are singing about, “taking everything this old Earth can give.” A concern that is a very real and perhaps underappreciated potential handbrake on present technology build out.

The key insight is trajectory risk: unlike nuclear catastrophe, which has a clear failure point, some risks unfold too slowly or diffusely to trigger timely intervention. As a global number one hit, “2525” is a reminder that audiences were, even in 1969, receptive to dystopian long-termism when it was compellingly presented.

Nena: “99 Luftballons” (1983) | Accidental nuclear escalation

Another multi-country number one smash hit, this German language song portrays an accidental nuclear escalation due to radar error (balloons not missiles). This is eerily similar to what happened approximately six months after the song’s release when Stanislav Petrov, a Russian officer correctly identifying a satellite warning of incoming US missiles as a false alarm. He disobeyed protocols to report it, suspecting a malfunction, saving the world from a retaliatory strike, and the song’s “Neunundneunzig Jahre Krieg” (99-year war).

The song is a rare and elegant illustration of accidental nuclear escalation in popular music and captures the “false alarm” problem, that being the danger that systems optimised for speed and deterrence remove the human hesitation that might otherwise prevent catastrophe. The lesson is clear, that misaligned systems and poor communication can destroy the world even without malicious intent.

Sung in German, inescapable on radio across Europe, 99 Luftballons achieved something rare, near-universal exposure within societies, creating a shared emotional experience that politicians could not ignore. We return to this point below.

Iron Maiden: “2 Minutes to Midnight” (1984) | Intentional nuclear risk

Less philosophically subtle than Dylan, but considerably more fun, Iron Maiden directly reference the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock, sitting at “two minutes to midnight”. A clock which now in 2026 sits at 85 seconds to midnight, marking a significant deterioration in global catastrophic risk since the song was released.

The critique is directed squarely at the political and military-industrial incentives that normalise nuclear brinkmanship, “As the reasons for the carnage cut their meat, And lick the gravy.” As with Zager and Evans the intergenerational impact of disaster is clear, “To kill the unborn in the womb.” The tone is angry rather than resigned, catastrophe is avoidable, and the obstacle is human choice.

This is a meaningful distinction in GCR thinking, where some risks are structurally determined, others are politically constructed. Nuclear war risk sits firmly in the latter category, which is why governance reform, treaty frameworks, and command-and-control safeguards remain tractable interventions.

Radiohead: “2 + 2 = 5” (2003) | Epistemic collapse; mis- and dis-information

Beginning ethereally, Radiohead deliberately reference George Orwell’s 1984 and foreshadow the global risk of mis- and dis-information. In more frantic mid-song terms we are warned that we have not been “paying attention”, or perhaps it is those seeking conspiracy explanation that are telling us to “pay attention” – the song’s central repetitive refrain.

Either way, this song released amid the manufacture of consent for invasion of Iraq, clearly anticipates the attention economy, and presents epistemological risk to humanity, asking what happens when enforced falsehoods displace shared reality?

“2 + 2 = 5” feels, two decades on, more rather than less relevant. Epistemic collapse is now a recognised GCR-adjacent risk, increasingly associated with AI-generated misinformation and coordinated disinformation campaigns. The song’s lesson is foundational, namely if societies cannot agree on facts, coordinated responses to any other global risk become functionally impossible. Information integrity is not a soft issue, it is the substrate on which all other risk mitigation depends.

Nine Inch Nails: “The Great Destroyer” (2007) | Systemic collapse and ‘Moloch’ dynamics

Trent Reznor’s dystopian 2007 album Year Zero is immersive and explicitly systemic. There is authoritarian surveillance, societal breakdown, biological or terror threats weaponised to justify repression.

The track “The Great Destroyer” is open to interpretation, but on one reading, in the tradition of Alan Ginsberg’s 1956 poem “Howl”, personifies the mechanics of multi-polar coordination failures, game theoretic traps that lead humanity deeper into catastrophe by favouring choices that are individually rational but collectively destructive.

Ginsberg calls this invisible destructive dynamic “Moloch” after the god of sacrifice, “Moloch the incomprehensible prison… Moloch whose blood is running money.” While for the Nine Inch Nails this is “The Great Destroyer.”

The Great Destroyer/Moloch is not a villain, but a process: self-reinforcing system dynamics driven by misaligned incentives, producing runaway outcomes no individual intended or wanted, outpacing governance.

The track begins relatively contained, then fractures into chaotic distortion, sonically enacting loss of control. This is precisely how many modern catastrophic risks operate, not through deliberate malice, but through individually rational actions aggregating into collectively catastrophic outcomes. Collapse comes bit by bit, then all at once.

This theme also highlights a secondary risk that appears frequently in both music and film, namely that responses to crises, emergency powers, expansion of surveillance, can themselves become catastrophic when they erode democratic norms.

Gojira: “Global Warming” (2012) | Environmental catastrophe

Taking their band’s name from the Japanese word for “Godzilla”, the original metaphor for nuclear threat, Gojira presented 2012 audiences with metal, anger, and a genuine sense of climate action urgency, “A world is done, and none can rebuild it.”

“We will see our children crying” is not subtle, but subtlety was never the genre’s priority. What distinguishes Gojira from many environmental-risk songs is that the track is not entirely fatalistic, a thread of “new hope” runs through the distortion, although there is tension between the catastrophe and the sliver of potential for recovery.

The anger in “Global Warming” functions as motivation rather than resignation, which puts it in an increasingly rare category among the songs on this list, the outro, “We will see our children growing,” communicates the hope that persisted through the early 2010s.

Muse: “Algorithm” (2018) | AI alignment and automation risk

From Muse’s album Simulation Theory, “Algorithm” depicts a world where artificial intelligence shapes perception and decision-making in ways that feel both seductive and inescapable. Precise, repetitive and synthetic sound invokes a world of automation and technology. From the outset we (or AI?), “Burn like a slave.”

The AI does not oppress through force but through optimisation, desires shaped, agency quietly subsumed, humanity rendered obsolete not by hostility but by efficiency. “This means war with your creator” captures a key transition: from control to contestation, where systems we built no longer reliably serve us, “Algorithms evolve.”

This maps closely onto contemporary concerns about AI alignment, it is not that systems will necessarily act maliciously, but that optimisation for specified goals may override or erode human values or produce unanticipated and destructive outcomes.

There is a faint thread of resistance in the song, but it is unclear whether it succeeds. The lesson appears to be that ceding decision-making to opaque algorithmic systems without meaningful oversight risks an irreversible narrowing of human autonomy and irreversible loss of control.

Tool: “Descending” (2019) | Slow-moving civilisational decline

Where Muse and Gojira deal with identifiable hazards, Tool is diffuse, oceanic. “Descending” frames civilisational decline in sweeping, elegiac terms, humanity as a once-great tide now receding. The lyrical plea to “stay the reading of our swan song” is urgency wrapped in resignation.

This song is a 13-minute epic, almost cinematic, journey. As with so many songs by Tool it is a spiritual journey for atheists, a meditation on the potential decline of contemporary human civilisation. “This madness of our own making,” puts the blame squarely on humanity itself, but calls for the “dread alarm” to, “stir us from our, wanton slumber.”

Written before the Covid-19 pandemic, Russian invasion of Ukraine, release of ChatGPT, or any of the subsequent years’ accumulation of crises, the plea to stay execution now feels tinged with quixotic hope.

Tool’s vision is paradigmatic of slow-moving GCRs, where the signals are visible, the trajectory is clear, but coordinated action lags behind awareness and a psychology of denial. The song’s emotional register is grief rather than anger, which may be more honest about where sustained inaction leads. Recognising risk is not the same as responding to it, and elegy is what you get when warning goes unheeded.

Muse: “We Are F#*king F#*ked” (2022) | Polycrisis and the failure of optimism

The title alone earns its place. Closing the Will of the People album, this track, written at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, contemporary with the energy crisis of 2022, is a study in late-stage pessimism. We hear systems spiralling, elites indifferent, collective agency exhausted. And yet with hindsight its commentary is situated pre-Trump v2.0, pre- global tariffs, pre-Israel/US war on Iran, pre-LLMs, if anything it should be read as hopeful!

“We’re at death’s door, another world war, Wildfires and earthquakes I foresaw, A life in crisis, a deadly virus, Tsunamis of hate are gonna find us.” The lyrics cover the spectrum of global catastrophe hazards, a true polycrisis with each amplifying the impact of the others.

What makes it analytically interesting is what it signals about Muse’s own trajectory. Their 2009 track “Uprising” was a call to arms, “we will be victorious!” By 2022, the same band was declaring the game over, with this titular resignation singing additionally, “it’s a losing game.”

This tracks a genuine shift in how many serious researchers view systemic and interacting risks: climate breakdown, governance failure, and technological disruption interacting in ways that overwhelm incremental solutions, with tail risk cases becoming most likely. The song echoes the spirit of Brad Werner’s famous paper at the American Geophysical Union, titled: “Is Earth F**ked?”, which asked, with deliberate provocativeness, whether systemic dynamics now preclude the changes needed to avert catastrophe. The lesson: delayed responses to accumulating risks eventually reach a tipping point where optimism itself becomes untenable.

What the Collection Tells Us

Considered as a whole, these ten songs have a structure that is worth naming. The nuclear entries (Nena and Iron Maiden) are the only ones in the collection where governance is presented as a tractable solution. This is not a coincidence. Nuclear risk genuinely did respond to political pressure: treaties were negotiated, hotlines established, launch protocols reformed. The enemy had a face, even if Dylan’s executioner kept his well-hidden.

The middle of the collection (Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails) operates differently. These songs address what might be called risk amplifiers. These are not threats or hazards imperilling human life directly, but undermine the preconditions for managing any risk at all. Epistemic collapse and coordination failure are upstream problems. If shared reality dissolves, or if Moloch dynamics mean that individually rational actors cannot help driving toward collectively catastrophic outcomes, then the tractability of any downstream risk deteriorates sharply.

This thought makes the middle cluster arguably the most strategically significant section of the list, even though it contains no images of mushroom clouds or dead oceans. The substrate on which all other risk mitigation depends is being quietly eroded, and these songs noticed. Humanity needed to act.

However, the later entries abandon solution-framing almost entirely. Tool offers elegy; Muse is a band travelling from defiant resistance to titular resignation. When the same creative community that once sang “we will be victorious” arrives at “it’s a losing game,” something has shifted in the ambient cultural temperature and it is worth asking what.

Several patterns recur across all ten songs with enough consistency to suggest they are capturing something real rather than reflecting the preoccupations of any single artist. Catastrophe, in this collection, is not always the result of a single cause or a single villain. From Dylan’s multi-domain collapse to Muse’s polycrisis, risk emerges from interacting systems, feedback loops, and the aggregated weight of small failures, it crosses institutional silos.

Misalignment, mistake, and accident feature far more prominently than malice. “99 Luftballons” and “2 Minutes to Midnight” make this point about nuclear risk; “Algorithm” makes it about AI; “The Great Destroyer” generalises it as a structural feature of complex systems. This convergence on accident-over-intent is striking, and consistent with how GCR researchers now understand the landscape, where “agents of doom” are just a subset of wider risk classification.

Perhaps the most persistent motif across all ten songs is the presence of visible warning that goes unheeded. From Dylan’s insistence on testimony to Radiohead’s accusation that “you have not been paying attention,” the collective argument of this music is not that catastrophe arrives without warning. It is that the warning is available, and something prevents it from being acted upon. That something, whether it be attention, will, institutional design, or the psychology of denial, is the real subject of the collection.

The shift in emotional register over six decades is measurable beyond this curated selection. Sentiment analysis of 6,150 Billboard Hot 100 songs from 1951 to 2016 found statistically significant movement toward the negative across the full period. The musicologist Ted Gioia, tracking key signatures, notes that the proportion of songs in minor keys has stabilised at a level dramatically higher than the 1970s and 1980s, with lyrics growing angrier in tandem. Slower, darker, angrier, these are independent signals pointing the same way.

The dominance of rock and art-rock in this blog’s selection is not accidental. These are the genres where the pessimistic turn was early and sharp, which may explain why they have engaged most explicitly with existential themes. The question, however, is whether the cultural drift these genres exemplify is a leading indicator of something broader, a reflection of accumulated real-world deterioration, or even the anticipation of decline.

Plato argued in The Republic that, “when the modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the State always change with them.” We seem to be seeing this.

Has Music Lost Its Leverage?

This brings us to an important implication. In 1983, “99 Luftballons” was a shared cultural object, inescapable across West Germany and much of Europe. This was not because an algorithm decided its listeners were already interested in nuclear anxiety, but because broadcast media delivered it to everyone. Politicians felt the weight of that consensus precisely because their constituents had all received the same message, through the same channels (eg radio), at the same time, and were talking about it in the same spaces.

Shared cultural objects create shared emotional states. Shared emotional states are what make collective political action possible. Soviet openness, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and massive nuclear disarmament followed.

The infrastructure now exists for a song to quickly reach a billion people. But the conditions under which music once moved societies collectively do not. Algorithmic personalisation means that a contemporary protest song, however urgent, reaches the already-convinced. The song does not cross the gap. Reach is not the same as persuasion, and persuasion across existing divisions is precisely what changes policy. Kneecap raging at Coachella in 2025 probably felt incredibly subversive, but it probably had less real world impact than Nena’s broad-based success in the early 1980s. Spectacle has expanded. Leverage may have contracted.

Conclusion

If my 2025 GCR films analysis suggested that cinema can act as a sentinel for global catastrophic risk, watching, warning, occasionally influencing policy directly, then popular music might be better understood as a barometer, registering ambient pressures rather than pointing at specific threats, capturing shifts in collective mood from fear to anger to resignation, often before those shifts surface in policy or public debate.

The trajectory across these ten songs describes a gradual erosion of perceived collective agency. Whether that reflects actual changes in the risk landscape, changes in perception, or changes in the cultural machinery available for translating concern into action is difficult to untangle. Probably all three, interacting in ways that are themselves a kind of Moloch dynamic.

What is harder to dispute is the mismatch where global catastrophic risks are, on most measures, increasing, but the cultural mechanisms for building shared concern and translating it into collective action are fragmenting. The tools are becoming less effective precisely as the task becomes more demanding. This is the world’s metacrisis.

Artists have often perceived the shape of emerging risks before they were formally named. Less constrained by institutional caution, they can follow an anxiety wherever it leads. When the tenor of popular music shifts demonstrably toward collective pessimism, as the data confirms it has, across genres and decades, it is worth asking what that shift is registering.

Right now, the needle is pointing somewhere uncomfortable. The question is whether anyone with the ability to act is “paying attention”, or whether we are indeed “F#*king F#*ked”.

By Matt Boyd & Nick Wilson

TLDR/Summary:

• The New Zealand DPMC and Ministry for the Environment’s briefing on resilience to hazards was tabled in Parliament in February 2026.
• We revisit this briefing amid the current global crisis arising from conflict in the Middle East.
• The final document is a clear improvement over the earlier 2025 draft, and credit to government officials is due.
• Though it still focuses on selected hazards, it better balances discussion of both risks and resilience, highlighting key resilience drivers like institutions, trust, and geography.
• It strengthens focus on maintaining basic needs during crises (food, water, energy, shelter).
• Public participation and deliberative democracy on risk and resilience are more clearly emphasised.
• A National Risk Register is now included as an annex, improving transparency, but this list still very much lacks depth.
• Disparate bodies of risk and resilience information now exist, but there is no one-stop shop for a comprehensive view of New Zealand’s national vulnerabilities and mitigation options.
• Adding a national mitigation register and ‘wish list’ would let society deliberate on what to do.
• Major gaps remain in public information on national risk, especially around global catastrophic risks (eg, wars impacting fuel supply, and worse).
• Official work on the National Resilience System is welcome, but stronger governance arrangements could help (eg, an independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Catastrophic Risks / Chief Risk Officer).

DPMC’s/MfE’s briefing on long-term resilience

A long-term insights briefing (LTIB) on New Zealand’s resilience to hazards, produced by the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC) and the Ministry for the Environment (MfE), was tabled in Parliament and examined by the Environment Select Committee in February 2026.

Considering the 2026 Strait of Hormuz crisis, it is worth assessing how this document has evolved, and what it signals not just about New Zealand’s approach to natural hazards, but to national risk more generally.

The draft of this LTIB was released in August 2025 and treated resilience as a national priority, acknowledged catastrophic hazards, and appropriately articulated the need to shift the conversation from response to crises to anticipatory governance for mitigating harms.

That mission was welcomed. But the draft also had clear gaps. It leaned heavily toward describing risks rather than resilience, it underplayed the importance of public deliberation, and it lacked the kind of transparent national risk architecture that would let the public see the broader picture across all risk.

We critiqued the draft of this briefing back in 2025 and provided a submission making the case that the opportunity was there to strengthen this publicly facing risk management document through broader risk coverage, including severe global catastrophic risks.

The draft also inspired us to write a peer-reviewed paper on anticipatory governance for major risks to New Zealand, published in Policy Quarterly (Nov 2025).

An improved framework for national hazards

The final published LTIB is substantially better. Not perfect. Not complete. But better in ways that matter, and that deserves to be said plainly.

The final version develops the hazard landscape a bit more fully, prefacing discussion of six selected hazards (pandemics, earthquake, tsunami, volcanic activity, severe weather and flooding, and space weather) with a clearer explanation that National Risks include both hazards and national security threats.

Furthermore, the final briefing is clear that New Zealand’s National Risk Register includes 14 hazards and 11 national security threats, and that the briefing is intentionally limited to the selected hazards, thereby carving out more limited scope for the briefing. Notably, three of these hazards are potentially global in scope and impact (pandemics, volcanic activity – causing volcanic winter, and space weather).

All this is good progress, but it leaves open the need for a comprehensive risk document, a place where citizens and organisations can explore all threats and hazards in detail, as well as global trends and global risks that might impact New Zealand.

The fragmented nature of the national approach to risk makes operational decision-making on resilience options difficult. This is important because resilience measures tend to be cross-cutting, mitigating a range of threats and hazards, local and global, if wisely chosen. Although central responsibility for certain risks might be siloed, organisations and citizens are not and want to know about the full spectrum of risk, without hunting out diverse information, across multiple entities.

There’s more than one way to close a strait

Within the hazard descriptions themselves, the final version tightens wording and adds some useful nuance. One notable addition is the final’s mention of very large volcanic events, including the global effects of eruptions like Mt Tambora (1815), which was not present in the draft.

Global effects of such eruptions are listed, including crop failures, famine, trade disruption and impacts on infrastructure and supply chains, which could be ‘severe’ and felt worldwide.

Researchers have previously noted the potential catastrophic impact of large volcanic eruptions at global ‘pinch points’, which could have impacts for New Zealand akin to, or worse than, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. As indicated in our submission, we’d like to see even more of these global catastrophic risks deliberated on in the public domain.

A better definition of national resilience

The definition of national resilience in the final version is also better, broader and more normatively loaded.

The draft defined resilience as the ability to “absorb, adapt to, recover from and transform through shocks and stresses.”

The final changes this to “prevent or minimise, absorb, adapt to, recover from and transform through shocks and stresses to enhance the safety, security and prosperity of our people.”

It also introduces a fairness dimension that is absent or only implicit in the draft: resilience must ensure all communities have the capability to cope, and it explicitly recognises te Tiriti o Waitangi as a foundational framework and supports Māori-led approaches.

Risk AND resilience

The biggest improvement is conceptual. The draft had a section titled “Forces that shape risk and resilience,” but in practice it mostly described forces shaping risk. Our submission pointed to that gap directly and argued that resilience has its own drivers: democratic institutions, cooperation, social capital, geography, and other assets that can be deliberately strengthened.

The final briefing now does exactly that. It has a distinct “Forces that shape resilience” section, and the categories are genuinely good: strong institutions, science/data/knowledge, cooperation, social capital and trust, and geographical advantages such as island geography, biosecurity, domestic food production, and renewable energy access.

We’ve noted before that New Zealand has many such advantages, but these need to be leveraged into resilience measures. A recent paper that one of us (MB) coauthored, actually maps out resilience factors in the face of global catastrophe, finding that New Zealand possesses much potential that could be harnessed with the right policies.

That shift from risk to risk-and-resilience matters because it changes the briefing from a catalogue of threats into the beginnings of a framework for agency and resilience building. Resilience is no longer treated as just the residual after we list what can go wrong. It is treated as something we can intentionally develop.

Need to ensure ‘basic needs’ for survival

Another important improvement is the stronger focus on basic needs. Our submission argued that resilience planning should centre on continuity of food, water, shelter, energy, communications, and transport, and that government should think in terms of backup or “Plan B” infrastructures, not just hardening the primary system. The final briefing does not go all the way there, but it does improve materially. Its definition of resilience now explicitly includes ensuring people can access “food, shelter, water and electricity” during crises, while also keeping government and businesses functioning.

Public deliberation is necessary

The final briefing also improves on participation. It refers to deliberative democracy around risk, explicitly noting that this could help address hard questions. That is not a trivial addition. Once we admit (as the briefing does) that resilience involves trade-offs, who pays, what gets protected, what standards we adopt, and how much redundancy we are willing to fund, then expert analysis alone is not enough. These are public choices. They require informed public judgment.

The community section is more participatory in the final. The draft’s “Community-led solutions” stresses preparedness, local supplies, and learning from Sweden and the UK. The final keeps those elements but adds a new paragraph on communities having a strong interest in resilience decision-making and introduces the Citizens Assembly on Auckland’s water supply as an example of deliberative democracy. That is a real change in the final’s imagination of resilience: not just communities as recipients or responders, but communities as central co-decision-makers.

Transparency and risk dialogue

Calls for transparency are improved. In our submission we called for a detailed publicly accessible National Risk Register. The final briefing now includes Annex 1: National Risk Register 2025 (which is also available on the DPMC’s website).

National Risks are comprised of hazards (non-malicious and often natural occurrences like earthquakes) and national security threats (malicious, such as cyberattacks, armed conflict, or disruption from new technologies like AI and biotechnology). The annex includes both.

That annex materially changes the document’s function: it is no longer just an interpretive briefing, but also a reference document that anchors the narrative in a formal risk inventory and explicitly links the briefing to that wider national risk architecture. This is a significant step forward. Public discussion about resilience is always thinner than it should be when the public cannot see the government’s underlying picture of risk.

That said, the usefulness of either the annex or the DPMC’s equivalent website are very limited by their lack of detailed information. The threats and hazards really just constitute a list of bad things, without details of likelihoods, worked scenarios illustrating first order and cascading consequences, current plans, and a menu of desired resilience options for public deliberation.

Giving credit for a much improved final briefing should not mean pretending the job is done.

Our submission argued that New Zealand’s resilience thinking should extend more explicitly to global catastrophic and existential risks, including conflict risks, advanced AI, bioengineered pandemics, supervolcanoes, and other globally generated disruptions. The final partially acknowledges this wider landscape by noting that national risks include hazards and national security threats, including armed conflict and disruption from AI and biotechnology. But it then explicitly confines the briefing itself to hazards. That is understandable administratively, but analytically it leaves an important gap.

The most obvious remaining limitation is scope, this briefing focuses on just six selected hazards. Many other hazards exist, as do malicious threats, but there are also many risks that are neither natural hazards, nor malicious threats to New Zealand, some of these are global and catastrophic in nature.

At some point, and in some form, organisations and citizens need to be provided with this broader picture of risk information, in a way that is not distributed across the silos of the public sector, a bit here, a bit there, and a bit left out. 

National security

Sitting in another silo, is the companion briefing to the LTIB discussed above. The 2023 National Security Long-term Insights Briefing acknowledges that global, externally originating crises, such as geopolitical conflict or disruptions to international systems, can pose significant risks to New Zealand. However, that briefing treats these risks largely at a high, conceptual level, framing them within broader trends like declining international order rather than analysing their concrete impacts.

As a result, it does not sufficiently grapple with the severe, practical consequences that a major global trade or energy disruption could have for a remote, import-dependent country like New Zealand.

It is notable that although these briefings mention resilience measures like battery storage, solar electricity, and basic needs such as food security, neither mentions liquid fuel at all. There is a single phrase in the new annex of the hazards briefing under “significant disruption or failure of critical infrastructure”, which says just “impact to… liquid fuel supplies”.  

In the present global context that is surprising. Our submission highlighted, ‘cascading global system failures (e.g., telecommunications, energy grids, shipping, fuel supply)’ as major hazards, the details of which should be included in public facing risk briefings.

Our NZCat report in 2023 concluded that the second most critical action the country needed to take to mitigate national risk was:

• Immediately develop an updated National Fuel Plan (that quantifies the volume needed by critical sectors and how to supply it) (p.104).

This was second only to:

• Immediately undertake a systematic & comprehensive National Risk Assessment (that explicitly includes global catastrophic risks).

We still believe these are two critical actions New Zealand must take as a nation (as a collaboration between the public sector and civil society).

National risk registers lack half the picture

Risk registers, as in the briefing’s annex, are still only half of what the nation needs. A list of risks is valuable. But if the briefing now endorses deliberative democracy, then the next step is obvious: we also need a corresponding list of mitigation options. Not necessarily mapped one-to-one against risks in a simplistic way, but a structured set of possible measures that correspond either to individual risks or to common cross-risk impacts whether these be liquid fuel constraints, or food disruption, catastrophic electricity loss, internet or communications failure, supply chain fracture, population displacement, or insurance retreat.

Global catastrophes will tend to have their consequences through common pathways, and it is in these pathways (as well as across key sectors) where resilience must be developed. The Figure illustrates three of these, namely ‘sunlight reduction’ (crop yields, food security, global food trade disruption); ‘global catastrophic infrastructure loss’ (interruptions to global energy supply, national electricity, or liquid fuel availability), and ‘global catastrophic biological risk’ (ie disease/pandemic disruption):

Only with clear and detailed information on all of the above can the public deliberate meaningfully on what we actually want to plan for, build, fund, what trade-offs we are prepared to make, and which resilience measures deserve priority.

A risk register tells us what might happen.

A mitigation register and ‘wish list’ would let us debate what we want to do about it.

With the National Hazards Board now former and new governance arrangements being made for the National Resilience System, there is an opportunity for a new approach to risk prioritisation, transparency, and structured public deliberation on resilience options.

There is also an opportunity to implement a ‘third line of defence’ through establishing an independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Catastrophic Risk, or a national Chief Risk Officer. This could help ensure integration of disparate risk silos and systematic coverage of all risk to New Zealand.

That, in our view, is where this should all go next. The final LTIB is very much better than the draft. The government officials writing it deserve recognition for that. And precisely because it is better, it opens the door to the next, harder, and more democratic conversation.

TLDR/Summary

• I recently presented our new research on Covid-19 outcomes (watch the recording embedded above – 37min, moderately technical), revisiting what analysts got wrong about pandemic preparedness and why.
• Pandemics remain a major global risk, and emerging AIxBio threats make it critical we understand what actually drives good pandemic outcomes.
• Early Covid-19 analyses were misleading due to flawed data (especially underreporting of deaths) and poor statistical methods.
• Our new, more robust analyses show that pandemic preparedness, measured by the Global Health Security (GHS) Index, does predict lower excess mortality, especially in non-island countries.
• Islands had fundamentally different pandemic experiences, with lower mortality driven by geography and border control strategies, so they must be analysed separately.
• Key structural factors differ by context: democracy mattered more in islands, while low inequality was more important for non-islands, highlighting that preparedness interacts with broader social conditions.
• The video above explains the technical details of all of this.
• You can download the slides here.
• Many thanks to my collaborators on this Covid-19 work: Nick Wilson, Michael G Baker, & Amanda Kvalsvig

Pandemics are still a major global threat

Pandemics remain one of the most significant global catastrophic risks. Covid-19 demonstrated not only the scale of harm that infectious disease can cause, but also how deeply uncertain our understanding of pandemic performance can be.

Looking forward, emerging risks at the intersection of artificial intelligence and biotechnology (AIxBio) could further amplify these threats. It is critical that the world correctly understands what determines good pandemic outcomes.

Much analysis on pandemic preparedness is flawed

A key debate during Covid-19 was whether traditional measures of pandemic preparedness actually mattered. Early in the pandemic, many analyses suggested that they did not.

The Global Health Security (GHS) Index, which purported to assess countries’ pandemic preparedness, appeared to have little or no explanatory power for Covid-19 outcomes. Some studies even found that higher-scoring countries performed worse.

These findings fed into a broader narrative: that “soft” factors such as trust, social cohesion, and low corruption mattered more than formal preparedness; that authoritarian regimes may have had an advantage; and that wealthier countries fared worse than expected.

However, these conclusions were based on early pandemic data and that data turned out to be deeply flawed.

As demonstrated in the presentation above, Covid-19 mortality reporting varied systematically across countries. Countries with stronger institutions, often those with higher GHS Index scores, were better at detecting and reporting deaths. Conversely, some countries with apparently “good” outcomes were simply undercounting mortality. When analyses relied on reported cases or deaths, they risked measuring data quality rather than pandemic performance. Similar confounding occurred due to the different age-structures of populations.

In addition, early studies often failed to account for key statistical issues. Variables such as GDP and mortality were highly skewed, yet were frequently analysed without transformation. As illustrated in the presentation above, applying appropriate transformations can substantially change results, sometimes eliminating spurious relationships altogether.

The key lesson is this: when analyses produce results that fly in the face of our a priori evidence-based hypotheses and expectations, we shouldn’t accept results uncritically. We must ask, why did the expected result not appear, what might be wrong with the data or our analysis?

Pandemic preparedness saves lives

More recent work, including our own research on the Covid-19 pandemic, using improved data and methods, tells a very different story. In the video above, I explain the technical details of why this occurred.

When excess mortality is used (rather than reported deaths), when age structure is accounted for, and when appropriate statistical transformations are applied, the GHS Index does in fact predict pandemic outcomes. For example, analyses such as that of Ledesma et al. (2023) showed a clear negative relationship between preparedness and mortality once some of these corrections are made.

In our own work, which carefully addressed additional critiques of the Ledesma et al. study, we find similar patterns: higher GHS scores are associated with lower excess mortality, particularly in non-island countries.

This reversal highlights a critical lesson: data quality and analytical choices matter enormously. Early pandemic narratives, while understandable given the urgency of the moment, were often based on incomplete or misleading evidence (as explained in the presentation above).

As better data has become available, some widely repeated claims now need to be reconsidered or reversed. Unfortunately some of the slogans emerging from these early analyses, and widely shared, have now established themselves as dis-informative slogans.

Islands experienced the pandemic very differently

Another key insight from our analysis is that not all countries should be treated as a single group. Islands, in particular, had a fundamentally different pandemic experience.

Historically, islands have had distinct advantages in infectious disease control, and Covid-19 was no exception. Island jurisdictions experienced dramatically lower excess mortality on average than non-islands. This reflects both geography and strategy: islands can more effectively implement border controls, and many pursued elimination strategies that were simply not available, or not chosen, elsewhere.

Because of these differences, combining islands and non-islands in a single analysis can obscure important relationships. When we separate them, clearer patterns emerge.

In non-island countries, preparedness, as captured by the GHS Index, strongly predicts outcomes. In islands, however, geography and border strategy play a much larger role, and preparedness metrics may behave differently. Many islands succeeded during Covid-19 despite their poor pandemic preparedness. But this pattern does not generalise to the non-island jurisdictions of the world.

Enhancing democracy and reducing inequality matter

The impact of structural factors also vary between these groups. Our results suggest that, among islands, democratic governance is associated with better outcomes, likely reflecting the importance of public consent and compliance in border-based strategies and elimination of local outbreaks.

In contrast, among non-islands, lower inequality appears to be a key determinant, perhaps because more equitable societies are better able to sustain collective action and protect vulnerable populations.

These findings help reconcile some of the apparent contradictions in early pandemic analyses. It is not that preparedness “doesn’t matter”, but rather that its effects interact with geography, strategy, and social structure in complex ways. The impact of preparedness, democracy’s crisis advantage, and inequality, are conditional on the context, and mutually reinforcing.

Islands should leverage their advantages

Finally, there may be broader lessons from island epidemiology. Islands have long been sites of successful infectious disease control, including the elimination of zoonotic diseases such as hydatid disease and brucellosis in some settings, and strong biosecurity responses to threats like avian influenza, which remains absent from New Zealand, Australia, and many Pacific Islands as at the time of writing. Their geographic isolation can enable tighter control over animal and human movement, reducing opportunities for pathogen introduction and spread.

This raises an intriguing possibility: that the advantages islands demonstrate in pandemic control may generalise to other infectious disease risks, particularly those involving zoonotic spillover. If so, understanding how island systems manage biosecurity could offer valuable insights for strengthening global preparedness, especially in an era of increasing biological risk.

As we prepare for future pandemics, the lesson is clear. Preparedness does matter, but only if we measure it properly, analyse it carefully, and understand the contexts in which it operates.

This is a guest post by Nick Wilson and Sam Ragnarsson, cross-posted from the Islands for the Future of Humanity Blog

TLDR/Summary

• While our organisation, Islands for the Future of Humanity (IFH), has largely focused on Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) to date, there are many lessons for island resiliency from other island jurisdictions. These are the focus of this Blog.
• Food production resiliency is particularly shown for Australia, Ireland and NZ with large excesses in production, but innovations are also present in Iceland (greenhouse use) and Singapore (factory food).
• Island jurisdictions are increasing their energy resiliency, particularly Australia as a world leader in rooftop solar. There is also domestic production of geothermal energy (Iceland, NZ),liquid biofuels (Australia), and wind energy (Ireland, Great Britain).
• Advanced deliberative democracy mechanisms are present in Ireland (citizens’ assemblies), and Taiwan(digital tools).
• High scores on the “Global Innovation Index” are seen for Singapore, Great Britain and Japan.
• Particularly strong public health responses to the Covid pandemic with relatively low burden of deaths resulting, were shown by Australia, New Zealand (NZ), Singapore and Taiwan.
• Island nations with histories of their societies surviving past disasters include: Iceland (volcanic-related famine); Great Britain (World War II); and Japan (famines, earthquakes and WWII).
• Other notable resiliency measures include: manufacturing capacity (Japan, Great Britain); domestic production of medicines and vaccines (Australia); building electric-powered shipping (Australia); and indigenous knowledge and activities that build resilience (NZ).  
• In summary, island jurisdictions provide multiple examples of resiliency to potential catastrophic risks, some of which are world leading. Island jurisdictions should do more to research their true level of resiliency (eg, when considering all imports) and share this knowledge with each other.

[To receive more updates like this blog, and invitations to our all-comers calls, complete the Islands for the Future of Humanity webform.]

Introduction

While much of the focus of Islands for the Future of Humanity (IFH) has centred on Aotearoa New Zealand – we are also concerned with island nations more broadly. So in this Blog we explore examples of resilience, focusing in this initial case on selected high-income democratic island states (future work will expand on this grouping). We particularly highlight illustrative strengths across five domains relevant to global catastrophic risk:

• Food security and production capacity
• Energy independence and diversity
• Democratic robustness and governance innovation
• Innovation and manufacturing capacity
• Historical experience of surviving major shocks

While the geographic boundedness of islands can create vulnerabilities (eg, trade dependency and supply-chain fragility) this can also confer strategic advantages. These can include the potential for relative isolation during global disruptions, better defined borders (eg, tighter border control in severe pandemics), and the potential for good governance.

The examples below demonstrate how some island jurisdictions are building resilience in such domains as food security, energy security, and adaptive governance. We also show how some have strengths in innovation and manufacturing capacity and have historical experience with navigating severe external shocks.

Notes on selected examples of resiliency measures

Australia

Overall resiliency: In an analysis of 38 island nations, Australia scored the best across aggregated metrics of resilience to abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios (eg, nuclear winter or volcanic winter) [1]. It had the largest excess food production under simulated nuclear winter scenarios. It also has “good-quality infrastructure, vast energy surplus” and “the second highest health security in the world”. Australia also scored the highest in another analysis of island nations as potential refuges for ensuring long-term human survival in the face of catastrophic pandemics (or other relevant existential threats) [2].

Energy (solar): Australia has become the world leader in residential solar panel uptake. Around 4.3 million homes (around a third of all Australian households) had solar panels installed by early 2026 [3]. Government subsidies have facilitated this growth in solar panel and home battery uptake.

Energy (liquid biofuels): Australia has a number of  biofuel plants, mainly focused on ethanol and biodiesel. The ethanol plants use the feedstocks of sorghum, waste starch and molasses. The biodiesel plants use the feedstocks of tallow, used cooking oil, and canola oil. Two Australian states have mandates for bioethanol.

Electric-powered shipping: Australia has recently built the world’s largest battery-electric ship [4].

Medicines/vaccines: Australia has a pharmaceutical industry that produces some vaccines and generic medicines [5]. In particular, it grows opium poppies which are the source of 37% of the world’s licit morphine supply [6]. It is also progressing mRNA vaccine development [7]. Australia produces a range of chemical feedstocks and catalysts that could be used for pharmaceutical production after a trade-ending catastrophe (as detailed in a study of its neighbour, NZ [8]).

Strong Covid pandemic response: Australia was one of the few jurisdictions that effectively applied an explicit exclusion/elimination strategy and which achieved a relatively low burden of deaths (in an analysis of 193 nations [9]). It used a state-of-the-art quarantine facility (Howard Springs in the Northern Territory) which had a notable record  of zero quarantine failures [10].

Great Britain

Large manufacturing sector: Great Britain has a large manufacturing sector, albeit it is fairly trade-dependent for material inputs (a dependency which lowers its resilience to catastrophes).

Wind and solar energy: In 2025, wind generated nearly 30% and solar over 6% of Great Britain’s electricity [11]. The year 2025 was a record year for growth of solar panels on rooftops (with around 250,000 new small-scale installations).

High innovation: According to “Global Innovation Index” the United Kingdom (ie, Great Britain and Northern Ireland together) ranked sixth in the world in innovation in 2025 [12]. This is the second highest ranking amongst all island nations (after Singapore).

History of surviving national threats: Britain successfully survived multiple severe stressors during World War II. These included trade restrictions (requiring a rapid and major upscaling of domestic food production), deaths and damage from aerial bombing, and devoting a high allocation of GDP towards the war effort.

Iceland

Overall resiliency: In an analysis of 38 island jurisdictions, Iceland was one of the top scoring ones in terms of resilience to abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios [1]. “Modeling of nuclear winter indicates that Iceland may suffer less climate impact than continental Europe” and “the Icelandic population is well educated, there are abundant fish resources, and most electricity generation is hydroelectric.” Iceland also scored third highest in another analysis of island nations as potential refuges for ensuring long-term human survival in the face of catastrophic pandemics (or other relevant existential threats) [2].

Local food production (greenhouses and fisheries): Iceland has successfully used its geothermal energy and greenhouses to boost local food production [13]. This production has improved food security and “locally grown food is also a source of national pride” [13]. Iceland also has a science-based “individual transferable quota” fisheries management system which has meant that “most fish stocks are sustainably managed” [14].

Near-total renewable electricity: A mix of hydro and geothermal energy mean that the electricity generation in Iceland is ~100% renewable. Furthermore, geothermal energy is used in district heating systems to heat over 90% of homes.

History of surviving disasters: Icelandic society has a long history of surviving volcanic disasters, including the 1783–1784 Laki eruption which caused a major famine [15]. The country also constantly deals with relatively severe climatic conditions given its proximity to the Arctic Circle.

Innovation in risk management: Iceland has constructed large-scale lava diversion barriers and earthworks to protect the town of Grindavík and the Svartsengi geothermal plant during recent volcanic eruptions. It also maintains one of the most advanced integrated volcanic and seismic monitoring systems globally (combining real-time geophysical data with rapid public communication through its Meteorological Office).

Ireland

Food exporter: Ireland is a major exporter of meat and dairy products and is approximately self-sufficient in potatoes. However, it does require some food imports (eg, of cereals, fruit and other vegetables), and the high livestock production is partly dependent on imports of soy meal and maize.

Investment in wind energy: Ireland has dramatically increased renewable electricity generation, particularly from wind. The latter accounted for 34% of electricity production in 2023 [16].

Strong deliberative democracy: Ireland has effectively used citizens’ assemblies (panels of randomly selected citizens tasked to make recommendations about public policies). “It held four consecutive randomly selected citizens’ assemblies” and “some of those processes produced major political outcomes through three successful referendums; no other country shows such as record” [17].

History of surviving disasters: As with Iceland (above), Ireland has a long history of surviving famines, particularly the “Irish potato famine” from 1845 to 1852. This involved around one million deaths (from starvation and disease) and over one million people left the country.

Japan

Large manufacturing sector: Japan has a large manufacturing sector, although this sector is very trade-dependent for both material and energy inputs. To some extent, the nuclear energy sector could continue electricity production if fossil fuel imports ceased in a catastrophe (ie, if stockpiles of imported uranium were sufficient).

High innovation: According to “Global Innovation Index” Japan ranked 12th in the world in innovation in 2025 [12]. This is the third highest ranking amongst all island nations.

History of surviving disasters: Japanese society has survived such disasters as famines [18], severe earthquakes and tsunamis, and devastation associated with World War II. The country also used some successful approaches in its response to the Covid-19 pandemic [19].

New Zealand

Overall resiliency: In an analysis of 38 island jurisdictions, NZ was one of the top scoring ones in terms of resilience to abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios [1]. In particular, it is has a large excess in food production (which it mainly exports). NZ also scored the second highest (after Australia) in another analysis of island nations as potential refuges for ensuring long-term human survival in the face of catastrophic pandemics (or other relevant existential threats) [2].

Renewable energy: A majority of NZ’s electricity generation is renewable (especially hydro, geothermal and wind). While the country’s agricultural production is extremely dependent on imported diesel [20], there is at least one food oil production facility (using locally-grown canola), that could potentially be converted to biodiesel production after a catastrophe.

Indigenous population knowledge and activities: Māori have a strong tradition of intergenerational stewardship (kaitiakitanga) that aligns with anticipatory governance. Furthermore, marae and tribal authorities provide for additional governance resiliency. Māori are also involved in the growth of “tribal economies” [21], local food sovereignty [22], and local renewable energy production [23].

Close links with Australia: NZ has relatively strong cultural, trading and defence links with Australia. This is a form of resiliency that might help with post-catastrophe supplies to NZ of medicines [8], liquid fuels, minerals, and key manufactured goods.

Covid pandemic response: NZ was one of the few jurisdictions that effectively applied an explicit exclusion/elimination strategy and which achieved a relatively low burden of deaths (in an analysis of 193 nations [9]). In a comparison of OECD island nations, it also had the best health outcomes, the lowest median stringency level of response, and ranked third best for macroeconomic outcomes [24].

Singapore

Advanced agricultural technologies: Singapore is a small island city-state with a food resilience strategy involving vertical farms and food factories using automation, AI and alternative protein solutions. The Government is leading with the goal of increased food self-sufficiency and with a “state-driven model for clustering” of food production hubs [25].

Covid pandemic response: Singapore was one of the few jurisdictions that effectively applied an explicit exclusion/elimination strategy and which achieved a relatively low excess mortality [9].

High innovation: According to “Global Innovation Index” Singapore ranked fifth in the world in innovation in 2025 [12]. This is the highest ranking amongst all island nations.

Taiwan

Deliberative democracy tools: Taiwan is using digital processes to improve public engagement in decision-making. Specifically, “vTaiwan is an open consultation process that brings Taiwan citizens and government together in online and offline spaces, to deliberate and reach rough consensus on national issues, and to craft national digital legislation” [26].

Covid pandemic response: Taiwan was one of the few jurisdictions that effectively applied an explicit exclusion/elimination strategy and which achieved a relatively low burden of deaths [9]. It used many effective interventions (eg, very strong border control, digital technologies, and rapid mask production) and was able to avoid a national lockdown [27].

Discussion

Based on the research for this Blog, it is clear that these eight island jurisdictions provide multiple examples of resiliency to potential catastrophic risks. Some of these are world leading, such as for Australia with residential solar uptake and electric shipbuilding. Three of these jurisdictions (Australia, Ireland and NZ) are also major food exporters and so could potentially help out other nations after a catastrophe. Nevertheless, some of these identified resiliency measures may be somewhat superficial when considering dependence on imports. For example, NZ’s food production is highly dependent on the supply of diesel [20], 100% of which is imported. NZ agriculture also uses imported: seeds, fertiliser, agricultural chemicals and farm machinery. Similarly, the strong manufacturing sectors of Japan and Great Britain are largely dependent on imported energy and materials. Such dependencies highlight the need for in-depth local research that determines the true level of resiliency for critical systems such as food, energy, communications and governance. Sharing such research could help build resiliency across all island jurisdictions. So could pre-catastrophe cooperation between these islands in terms of research, security arrangements, and trade.

References

1.         Boyd M, Wilson N. Island refuges for surviving nuclear winter and other abrupt sunlight‐reducing catastrophes. Risk Analysis.2023;43(9):1824-1842.

2.         Boyd M, Wilson N. The prioritization of island nations as refuges from extreme pandemics. Risk Analysis. 2020;40(2):227-239.

3.         Norman J. Maximising time in the sun: how to maintain and repair solar panels to make them last. The Guardian 2026;(13 February). https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2026/feb/13/maximising-time-in-the-sun-how-to-maintain-and-repair-solar-panels-to-make-them-last?

4.         White M. World’s largest battery-electric ship enters harbor trials. New Atlas 2026;(28 January). https://newatlas.com/marine/incat-hull-096-battery-electric-ship-harbor-trials/.

5.         Coomber P, Nissen L. Why doesn’t Australia make more medicines? Wouldn’t that fix drug shortages? The Conversation 2025;(12 May). https://theconversation.com/why-doesnt-australia-make-more-medicines-wouldnt-that-fix-drug-shortages-255766.

6.         McAlister S, Ou Y, NeffE, Hapgood K, Story D, Mealey P, McGain F. The Environmental footprint of morphine: a life cycle assessment from opium poppy farming to the packaged drug. BMJ Open. 2016;6(10):e013302.

7.         Australian Government mRNA vaccine manufacturing facility commences construction in Melbourne. Australian Government (Department of Industry, Science and Resources). 2022;(9December). https://www.industry.gov.au/news/mrna-vaccine-manufacturing-facility-commences-construction-melbourne. .

8.         Wilson N, Wood P, Boyd M.Capacity to manufacture key pharmaceuticals in New Zealand after a global catastrophe. The New Zealand Medical Journal (Online). 2025;138(1625):44-58.

9.         Boyd M, Baker MG, Kvalsvig A, Wilson N. Impact of Covid-19 control strategies on health and GDP growth outcomes in 193 sovereign jurisdictions. PLOS Global Public Health.2025;5(10):e0004554.

10.       Grout L, Katar A, Ait Ouakrim D, Summers JA, Kvalsvig A, Baker MG, Blakely T, Wilson N. Failures of quarantine systems for preventing COVID‐19 outbreaks in Australia and New Zealand. Medical Journal of Australia. 2021;215(7):320-324.

11.       Poynting M, Dale B, Carr J. Record year for wind and solar electricity in Great Britain in 2025. BBC News 2026;(3 January). https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz947djd3d3o.

12.       Global Innovation Index. Global Innovation Index (GII) 2025.  https://www.wipo.int/web-publications/global-innovation-index-2025/en/gii-2025-results.html.

13.       Butrico GM, Kaplan DH. Greenhouse agriculture in the Icelandic food system. European Countryside.2018;10(4):711-724.

14.       Gunnlaugsson SB, Valtysson H. Sustainability and wealth creation, but no consensus: Recent decades in Iceland’s ITQ-managed fisheries. Marine Policy. 2022;135:104836.

15.       Wieners CE. Haze, hunger, hesitation: Disaster aid after the 1783 Laki eruption. Journal of Volcanology and Geothermal Research. 2020;406:107080.

16.       Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland. Renewable energy in Ireland. https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/key-publications/renewable-energy-in-ireland.

17.       Courant D. Citizens’ Assemblies for Referendums and Constitutional Reforms: Is There an “Irish Model” for Deliberative Democracy? Frontiers in Political Science.2021;2:591983.

18.       Jannetta AB. Famine mortality in nineteenth-century Japan: the evidence from a temple death register. Population Studies. 1992;46(3):427-443.

19.       Tashiro A, Shaw R.COVID-19 pandemic response in Japan: What is behind the initial flattening of the curve? Sustainability. 2020;12(13):5250.

20.       Boyd M, Ragnarsson S, Terry S, Payne B, Wilson N. Mitigating imported fuel dependency in agricultural production: Case study of an island nation’s vulnerability to global catastrophic risks. Risk Analysis. 2024;44(10):2360-2376.

21.       Andrews E. ‘Thriving’ Māori economies revealed in new report. Radio NZ 2025;(16 July). https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/567090/thriving-maori-economies-revealed-in-new-report.

22.       Wehi PM, Cox MP, Whaanga H, Roa T. Tradition and change: Celebrating food systems resilience at two Indigenous Māori community events. Ecology and Society. 2023;28(1).

23.       Ellis M. ‘If the stars align, boom!’: Ngā Wairiki-Ngāti Apa bets on green energy. Radio NZ 2026;(20February).

24.       Summers JA, Kerr J, GroutL, Kvalsvig A, Baker MG, Wilson N. A proactive Covid-19 response associated with better health and economic outcomes for OECD High-Income Island Countries. SSM-Population Health. 2025;31:101827.

25.       Tang B. Feeding the Future: Growth, Resilience, and Innovation in Singapore’s Food Factory Sector. The Savills Blog 2025;(28 November). https://www.savills.co.nz/blog/article/225659/singapore-articles/feeding-the-future–growth–resilience–and-innovation-in-singapore-s-food-factory-sector.aspx.

26.       Hsiao Y-T, Lin S-Y, Tang A, Narayanan D, Sarahe C. vTaiwan: An empirical study of open consultation process in Taiwan. SocArXiv. 2018;4.

27.       Summers J, Cheng H-Y, Lin H-H, Barnard LT, Kvalsvig A, Wilson N, Baker MG. Potential lessons from the Taiwan and New Zealand health responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Lancet Regional Health–Western Pacific. 2020;4.

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A short link-post today, so you can listen to my interview (15min) with Emile Donovan on Radio New Zealand about trade and supply risks.

With the strait of Hormuz under threat due to Israel and the US’s attacks on Iran, trade and supply will be strained. There is risk of conflict spreading (Suez, Yemen), and this context means any synchronous crisis would massively amplify the problem (think of a major volcano near the Strait of Malacca, or an opportunistic China blockade of Taiwan).

NZ has been described as the ‘last bus stop on the planet‘ and its greatest risk is supply collapse impacting fuel, fertiliser, and replacement parts, resulting in inexorable degradation of critical functions. If not now, then at some point in the future given the reality of more than a dozen rising and interacting global stresses (climate, demography, ideological fragmentation, zoonotic disease, AI, geopolitical tension, etc).

Our 2023 NZCat Project Report analysed these Global Catastrophic Risks, and recommended:

• An independent Parliamentary Commissioner for Catastrophic Risk
• A National Food Security Plan
• Local biodiesel production at a minimum level to sustain minimal agriculture
• Distributed and islanded electricity generation systems including solar and geothermal
• Local digital technology for government services, payments, and communication
• Improved coastal shipping assets, electric rail, and urban design
• A publicly facing National Risk Register and deliberative democracy on resilience options
• Cooperation with Australia on global risk resilience
• And many other recommendations…

Which political party will run with a vision for NZ’s resilience to global reality in the 2026 election?

The convergence of AI and biotechnology advances is fast becoming one of the most serious security challenges of our time.

A recent Time magazine piece highlighted a troubling blind spot in how this risk is being governed: while policymakers and frontier AI companies have taken steps to guard against pandemic-scale bioterrorism, the broader landscape of AI-enabled biological threats, particularly at the level of state actors, is receiving far less attention than it deserves.

The Nuclear Threat Initiative has recently published an AIxBio Horizon Scan.

This is in a geopolitical context where the President of the United States and his Secretary for War are seeking to dictate that frontier AI companies make their models available for waging war without human oversight.

In the video above, Prof Nick Wilson presents our introduction to this risk space, exploring how rapidly advancing AI capabilities are lowering the barriers to biological harm, and what a more comprehensive response might look like.

The world’s jurisdictions need to rapidly address this risk and act through prevention, international agreements, outbreak surveillance, and preparation for bio-catastrophe response. New Zealand needs to join a coalition of concerned nations and step up pressure.

The 16 minute talk titled “Anticipating and Managing Threats from Artificial Intelligence and Bioweapons” was presented in August 2025.

It was part of a University of Otago webinar series titled: “Imagining Past Pandemics and Preparing for the Future”.

A PDF of the PowerPoint is available here.

Read our blog on how New Zealand might better approach the broader issue of long-term global risk resilience here.

TLDR/Summary

• New Zealand is debating building an LNG import terminal to address dry-year electricity shortages and price spikes, but this frames the problem too narrowly.
• Our NZCat Project (2023) found NZ’s greatest energy risks come from global disruptions, like nuclear conflict or trade isolation, not just domestic generation variability.
• LNG solves a first-order problem (dry-year shortfalls) while worsening a deeper one: it increases reliance on imported fuel and complex supply chains that are most likely to fail in a global crisis.
• True resilience requires prioritising domestic, decentralised energy, including renewables, storage, electrification, biofuels, and geothermal, over globally integrated solutions.
• Geothermal stands out as a good alternative: it provides firm, dispatchable power like LNG, but is entirely domestic and fuel supply-chain independent.
• This is a fundamental strategic choice between a market-integrated energy model (optimise for cost) and a sovereign resilience model (optimise for survival under disruption), and these two approaches are incompatible.
• The NZ public deserves a national debate on resilience trade-offs in the context of global catastrophic risk, and this should become a 2026 election issue.

Background

New Zealand is currently debating whether to build an LNG import terminal. The discussion is framed in familiar terms: declining domestic gas supply, rising electricity prices, and the need for firm generation to manage dry hydro years.

Within that framing, LNG is has arguable merits. It provides dispatchable fuel, reduces price volatility, and offers a form of “insurance” against low rainfall and low wind. On those terms, it is a plausible option.

But before deciding what infrastructure to build, it is worth asking a more fundamental question: What problem should we be trying to solve?

Is the objective to reduce electricity price spikes over the next decade? Or is it to ensure that New Zealand can meet basic energy needs under severe global disruption?

These are not the same question. And they lead to very different answers.

The NZCat Project

In 2023, we completed the Aotearoa NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat) and studied New Zealand’s resilience to global catastrophic risks (GCRs), specifically including a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war scenario. With ongoing war in Ukraine, tensions in the Middle East, and a new accelerating nuclear arms race, this and other GCR scenarios become more salient. We’ve made this case at length in our recent Policy Quarterly article in response to the DPMC’s draft Long-term Insights Briefing on long-term resilience.

The NZCat project’s central finding was that the most severe risks to New Zealand do not originate locally. They arise from global system shocks that could disrupt trade, energy supply, and critical infrastructure simultaneously.

In that context, the dominant risk is not dry-year variability. It is extended trade isolation, potentially for months or years where imports are constrained or unavailable.

That changes the decision framework and we have previously described this problem and possible solutions for NZ’s liquid fuel security.

LNG: Solving one problem by worsening another

The current LNG proposal solves one problem, namely dry-year electricity shortages, but it does so by increasing dependence on imported fuel. It addresses variability in domestic generation by relying more heavily on the very system that is most likely to fail under global disruption.

Put simply, LNG solves one problem by worsening another.

The language of “insurance” is used frequently in the LNG debate, but it is worth being clear about what is being insured.

LNG provides insurance against short-term variability in hydro and wind. It is a hedge against a particular, well-understood risk within the electricity system.

But the NZCat work highlights a different class of risk entirely. These are low-probability, high-impact events that could disrupt multiple systems simultaneously, including energy, transport, food, and communications.

In those scenarios, the question is not whether electricity prices spike. It is whether the system continues to function at all.

Under that framing, insurance against collapse dominates marginal cost efficiency. The objective is no longer to optimise the system for price. It is to ensure that the system remains viable under extreme conditions.

This is where standard economic reasoning starts to break down. LNG may look rational under expected value calculations, where probabilities are weighted against costs. But it performs poorly under tail-risk minimisation, where avoiding catastrophic failure is the priority.

Another way to see this is to distinguish between first-order failures and system collapse. The current debate is focused on first-order failures: electricity shortages, price spikes, and generation gaps. LNG may be suited to addressing these. It provides firm capacity that can be dispatched when needed.

But the NZCat research emphasised cascading failures across interconnected systems. Energy is not an isolated sector. It underpins transport, food production, communications, and economic activity. If one system fails, others follow.

LNG addresses first-order failures, not system collapse. It does not solve the problem of fuel supply disruption. It does not address the vulnerability of global supply chains. And it does not reduce dependence on external systems. In some respects, it increases it. This is before even beginning to consider the implications for other priorities such as reduced climate emissions.

There is a deeper tension here between efficiency and resilience. Modern energy systems are optimised for efficiency. They rely on global supply chains, just-in-time delivery, and tightly integrated markets. These characteristics reduce costs (and increase gentailer profits) in normal conditions. But they also increase fragility.

LNG may be efficient in current markets. It allows New Zealand to access global gas supplies and smooth out variability in domestic generation. But it is not resilient under disruption. It depends on shipping, international markets, honouring of contracts, and complex infrastructure that may not function in a global crisis, particularly in an increasingly geopolitically fragmented world.

Resilience, by contrast, often looks inefficient. It involves redundancy, spare capacity, and local capability. It may require upfront costs and investment in systems that are not fully utilised in normal times. But these are precisely the features that allow a system to continue functioning under stress.

Viewed through a global catastrophic risk lens, LNG has three core problems

First, it deepens import dependence. LNG is reliant on international supply chains. If those supply chains are disrupted, the fuel is not available. This is not a theoretical concern. Trade disruption is a central feature of many catastrophic scenarios, for example shipping blockades in a China-Taiwan standoff or kinetic war.

Second, it introduces infrastructure fragility. LNG terminals are large, centralised, and complex. They require ongoing maintenance, specialised parts, and skilled personnel. These are all points of vulnerability in a disrupted environment.

Third, there is an opportunity cost. Capital invested in LNG is capital not invested in domestic energy systems. It is not spent on building local generation, storage, or resilience. That matters because resilience is cumulative. Every investment shapes the system we will have in a crisis.

If LNG is not the answer, what does a resilient energy system look like?

The NZCat report emphasised diversification and domestic capability. The goal is not to eliminate risk (this is impossible) but to reduce dependence on any single system and to ensure that basic needs (eg agriculture, food transport, clean water, heating) can be met under a wide range of scenarios.

This includes:

• incentivising diverse electricity generation: solar, biomass, wind, and geothermal
• diversifying storage: pumped hydro, batteries, and other technologies
• increasing electrification to reduce reliance on liquid fuels
• developing local fuel options such as biofuels
• Minimising the risk of centralised failure with residential solar and battery installations as well as electricity grid islanding

The logic is straightforward. From an economic perspective, NZ domestic generation avoids ongoing fuel import costs and provides stable, long-lived assets. From an energy security perspective, it reduces exposure to global markets and supply chains. It creates systems that can operate independently if necessary.

Geothermal Energy

Within this framework, geothermal energy appears to stand out. Geothermal provides firm, dispatchable power. It is not dependent on weather in the way that hydro or wind are. And crucially, it is domestic. It does not rely on imported fuel.

In the NZCat analysis, geothermal looks close to ideal for resilience. It combines reliability with independence from global supply chains. The contrast with LNG is stark:

Under a global catastrophic risk framing, geothermal is strictly superior for resilience. It provides the same functional role, namely firm generation, but without the dependency on external systems.

Including GCRs in the analysis changes how the LNG proposal looks

LNG shifts from being a straightforward solution to being a partial solution with important trade-offs. It reduces one type of risk while increasing another.

Energy security itself takes on a different meaning. It is no longer about access to global markets. It is about autonomy, ie the ability to operate without them.

Alternatives that may appear marginal in a narrow economic analysis become more attractive. Domestic renewables, storage, electrification, and local fuel production all contribute to a system that is more robust under disruption.

Infrastructure decisions become strategic rather than purely economic. The question is not just cost per megawatt-hour, but whether the system can function under stress.

Even the concept of insurance changes. LNG is insurance against variability in domestic generation. But resilience planning requires insurance against much larger disruptions, events that could affect multiple systems simultaneously. We have demonstrated the magnitude of these risks in a paper looking at Australia’s risk landscape when GCRs are considered, see an early preprint here.

At its core, the LNG debate reflects two different energy strategies. One is a market-integrated approach. It relies on global supply chains, flexible imports, and optimisation for cost. LNG might fit naturally within this model. The other is a sovereign resilience approach. It prioritises domestic capability, diversification, and the ability to operate independently. It is less efficient in normal conditions, but more robust under disruption and therefore more efficient in the longer term through iterated crisis.

These strategies are not fully compatible. Choosing one shapes the system in ways that make the other harder to achieve.

The LNG debate, then, is not just about a terminal. It is about how New Zealand thinks about risk. And I have not yet seen the government open this up for public debate. We need to discuss global risk as a nation and establish a value/goal consensus on resilience and trade-offs. Which political party will take this theme and run with it into the election?

If we optimise for expected outcomes (ie what is most likely to happen), and ignore critical goals like reducing climate emissions, then LNG may be a reasonable investment. It addresses known risks and fits within existing market structures.

But if we take seriously the increasing possibility of global disruption, where trade is constrained, systems are stressed, and multiple failures occur simultaneously, interacting in complex ways, then the priorities change.

Energy policy is part of a broader question

Can New Zealand maintain basic functions under extreme conditions?

In 2023, our NZCat work suggested that answering that question requires a different approach. It requires an all-hazards risk framework, planning for global catastrophe and trade disruption, and investment in domestic, resilient systems.

That does not necessarily rule out LNG. But it does mean that LNG should not be evaluated in isolation, and LNG starts to look seriously sub-optimal through this broader resilience lens.

Ultimately, the decision is not just about electricity prices in a dry year. It is about whether the system we build today will still work when conditions are no longer normal.

Appendix: NZCat Energy Resilience Framework

TLDR: Meta-crisis: the mechanisms that should solve problems are themselves deteriorating.

My Society for Risk Analysis Conference Presentation

At the Australia New Zealand Society for Risk Analysis Conference in Christchurch on 29-30 Jan 2026 it was clear that systemic risk and polycrisis concepts are moving from the margins to the centre of risk analysis.

In my own presentation I uniquely connected these dynamics to cultural evolution and the degradation of societal evolvability (ie our ability to produce complex adaptations to mitigate global risk).

Stream the audio of my presentation (15 min)

Download my slides (pptx)

Global risk mitigation is like the parable of the blind monks and the elephant: each of at least six disciplines grasps a real part of the problem, but none sees or acts on the whole.

Current disaster risk reduction reveals we are systematically underprepared for rare-but-catastrophic events; global catastrophic risk research shows that some of these threats could overwhelm civilisation entirely. Yet national risk assessments indicate that governments mostly plan as if risks were local, isolated, and manageable, when in reality they are not.

Systemic risk and polycrisis research deepens the picture by showing that the world is not just facing many dangers, but rising, interacting stresses that can cascade across tightly coupled global systems. This means today’s risk landscape is not simply a series of external shocks, but a living, unstable system generating hazards from within itself.

But these frameworks still leave a crucial question unanswered: why do humans keep building such a fragile world?

In my talk I noted that the answer requires turning to human behaviour and cultural evolution. Human actions are shaped by biases, incentives, institutions, and evolved social dynamics that develop in response to built and inherited human environments.

These processes give rise to many strategies that are locally successful but globally disastrous. Over time, these dynamics can create maladaptive “trap states”, even worse, they can erode society’s very capacity to adapt.

Evolvability is the key

I contested that the notion of ‘evolvability’ becomes central. For societies to cope with an unpredictable future, humanity must avoid entrenchments and path-dependent maladaptation. There is need for the right kinds of variation, modularity, institutional and informational stability, and effective constraints on harmful “outlaw” strategies, or complex adaptations to mitigate risk cannot emerge. Yet arguably all of these are currently degrading on the global stage.

As a result, humanity is not just producing risks faster than it can manage them; it is undermining the mechanisms that would allow us to learn, adapt, and recover.

The meta-crisis

Formally, this is a meta-crisis. We are not only in a polycrisis where multiple risks are interacting resulting in threats greater than the sum of their parts, we are losing the capacity to evolve our way out of it, which means the core task is not merely risk reduction, but preservation of, and working with, the ingredients of human system evolvability itself.

Addressing global risk requires understanding and acting across all six of these (and other) fields together. This is likely to require integrative governance across risk disciplines and jurisdictions (a story for another day).

Systemic risk and polycrisis: the emerging norm of risk science

At the SRA conference, I was certainly not alone in diagnosing systemic risk as a critical theme in present-day risk analysis, and this was illustrated across many sessions, by a range of contributors.

Taken collectively, the Christchurch SRA conference suggests a clear shift in risk science away from isolated-hazard, probability–impact framing toward a more systemic conception of risk. Across keynotes, methodological talks, and applied case studies, speakers repeatedly foregrounded interdependence, cascades, emergence, polycrisis-like dynamics, and value pluralism.

Systemic risk thinking is no longer confined to niche complexity scholarship but is increasingly shaping both academic risk analysis and practical decision-making frameworks.

I suggest that even with this convergence on the nuance and interdependent complexity of risk, we will never escape a cascade of escalating global risk until we find ways to address the behavioural and evolutionary generative mechanisms of the situation the world is presently in.

We should build societies that are safe and resilient because they can evolve well, not because they try to predict everything or stay the same.

A focus on engineering and nudging ‘evolvability’ provides the potential for a broad-based structural solution to global risk. I’m planning deeper work on this issue…

An in-depth read, ~15 min

TLDR/Summary

• Global systems theorist Thomas Homer-Dixon gave a webinar on Nov 6, 2025 in which he described the Cascade Institute’s breakthrough approach to modelling global systemic risk. You can watch the full video of his presentation on the ASRA YouTube channel.
• The Polycrisis Core Model (PCM) is a sophisticated analytical tool that not only maps the complex interactions driving today’s global crises but could help identify concrete pathways toward more hopeful futures.
• Moving beyond speculation: Previously, ideas about achieving positive global transformation were largely speculative. Now, based on 1,800 expert judgments and rigorous mathematical modelling, there’s a grounded, evidence-based approach to understanding how we might navigate out of today’s entangled crises.
• The PCM uses Cross Impact Balance (CIB) analysis to model 11 global subsystems (covering everything from economy and climate to food and governance), each with multiple possible states, generating over 4 million potential future scenarios for humanity by 2040.
• Only 11 scenarios are truly stable: Out of 4 million possibilities, the mathematics reveals just 11 “consistent” scenarios, or attractors in an 11-dimensional state space. Three major attractors emerge: Illiberal Decline, Mad Max, and Hope.
• The Hope attractor exists but is narrow: The good news is that a positive future is mathematically possible. The challenging news is that Hope attracts only about 100,000 scenarios compared to Mad Max’s 500,000, and it remains climatically “Hot” (high degrees of global warming), these facts mean resilience work against collapse remains a critical hedge.
• Democracy appears non-negotiable: The analysis reveals clear policy targets which most notably include maintaining democracy, this appears essential for any pathway to Hope. Without democratic systems, initial modelling suggests no viable route to positive outcomes.
• The work is actionable, not academic: The model identifies specific leverage points for interventions and provides a framework for understanding which policy moves might push us toward the edge of Hope’s basin of attraction, where natural system dynamics would pull us in to a positive future.

Introduction: Can We Model Our Way to Hope?

On November 6, 2025, Thomas Homer-Dixon presented findings from the Cascade Institute’s Polycrisis Core Model to a webinar hosted by the Accelerator for System Risk Assessment (ASRA). The presentation offered something rare in discussions of global catastrophic risk: not just a diagnosis of our predicament, but the potential for a mathematically grounded pathway through it.

This matters because, as Homer-Dixon emphasised, previously speculative ideas about reaching hopeful futures are now grounded in modelling and evidence. Based on approximately 1,800 expert judgments, the work demonstrates a concrete way to navigate toward hope, or at least to understand the terrain we must cross.

The timing is significant. As I reported in my recent blog on the ASRA Symposium, humanity faces accelerating, amplifying, and interacting crises across interconnected global systems. This polycrisis isn’t theoretical it is the world’s lived reality of pandemics, climate change, geopolitical conflict, economic instability, and democratic backsliding all reinforcing one another. For a New Zealand perspective on this see our recent paper on long-term resilience to global risk.

What the Cascade Institute’s new Polycrisis Core Model (PCM) offers is the potential for a way to move from acknowledging this complexity to actively navigating it.

The Cascade Institute’s Approach

The Cascade Institute has focused its work on identifying high-leverage interventions in global systemic risk. Their CORE initiative examines what pathways exist toward better futures through rigorous systems analysis.

The PCM represents the latest evolution of this work. As Homer-Dixon explained in the webinar linked above, it builds on the legacy of the “Limits to Growth” report (which Homer-Dixon called “the granddaddy of world models”) but employs more sophisticated methods suited to understanding social and political systems where relationships are inherently fuzzier than in physical or ecological models.

The CORE Model’s ambition is substantial: to create a “global system-of-systems” analysis projecting to 2040, capable of mapping millions of possible futures and identifying which are self-reinforcing (and therefore stable) and which policy interventions might shift humanity’s trajectory away from worse world states and into more hopeful ones.

Crucially, this isn’t just descriptive work. The model aims to identify plausible pathways to positive transformation, or what Homer-Dixon called finding the “self-reinforcing virtuous processes” that could move us toward flourishing world states rather than collapse.

The Technical Architecture: How the Model Works

For those comfortable with complexity science, the PCM employs Cross Impact Balance analysis (see below). But Homer-Dixon’s presentation makes the core methodology accessible to non-specialists.

The Building Blocks: 11 Subsystems, 45 States

The model divides global systems into 11 subsystems, split between social and material domains. Each descriptor can exist in one of 3-5 possible states across time. This creates the model’s vast scenario space:

Social subsystems (5):

• Economy (states: laissez-faire growth, guided growth, low growth, managed economic contraction, unmanaged economic failure)
• Polity Type (states: strong democracy, illiberal democracy, strong autocracy, weak autocracy, nonocracy)
• World Order (states: international fragmentation, multipolarity, consolidated blocs, multilateral rules-based order, thick global governance)
• Inequality (states: various combinations of low/high international and domestic inequality)
• Conflict & Security (states: low violence, widespread non-state violence, civil/proxy war, international war, great power war)

Material subsystems (6):

• Energy (states: fossil-fuel dependence, peak oil and gas, green-tech breakthrough, low-carbon energy contraction)
• Climate (states: increased global heating of <2.5°C in 2100, 2.5-4°C, >4°C)
• Health (states: high/medium/low burden of disease)
• Food (states: status-quo global industrial production, agri-tech breakthrough, agro-ecological production, variable regional production, failed global industrial production)
• Transportation (states: fit for the future, fit for now, fragmented and failing)
• Information technology (states: limited rollout, managed rollout, unmanaged rollout)

The Method: Cross Impact Balance Analysis

Cross Impact Balance (CIB) analysis was developed by Wolfgang Weimer-Jehle in a 2006 paper. This method is particularly powerful for social systems because it can integrate different types of data and expert judgment about fuzzy relationships.

The core of the approach involves creating a judgment matrix showing all descriptors (ie all global subsystems and their possible states) and their relationships to each other, including:

• Whether relationships are promoting or inhibiting
• The strength and confidence level of each relationship

A crucial methodological constraint disciplines the analysis: scores within each judgment group must sum to zero. This “balancing constraint” prevents arbitrary or unconstrained assessments and forces careful consideration of trade-offs.

The model required 110 separate judgment sections (eg, “effect of world order on economy”), resulting in approximately 1,800 individual expert judgments (across the 45 different states). These judgments are supported by 200 pages of research and rationale, allowing independent assessment of their validity. The judgment model and it’s calculation matrix, are completely transparent.

The Mathematical Core: Finding Consistency

With 45 possible states across 11 descriptors, the model theoretically encompasses 4,050,000 possible scenarios or “futures.”

The CIB mathematical framework determines which scenarios are “consistent”, which means they are self-reinforcing. A consistent scenario is one where the various system states mutually support each other, creating a stable configuration.

Think of it like this: some combinations of system states reinforce each other (eg, strong democracy + multilateral cooperation + managed technology rollout), while others create contradictions that make them unstable (eg, authoritarian regimes + thick global governance).

The Findings: Three Attractors and a Narrow Path to Hope

The mathematics reveals that out of 4 million possible states, only 11 are fully consistent. These function as attractors in the 11-dimensional state space. Attractors are stable configurations toward which the global system naturally tends.

Three Major Attractors Emerge

Simplifying these results, Cascade Institute researchers identified three main types of attractors:

1. The Illiberal Democracy Attractor: A world of democratic backsliding and constrained freedoms
2. The Mad Max Attractor: Characterised by state failure, widespread violence, and collapsed governance, Homer-Dixon referenced Haiti as a current example
3. The Hope Attractor: A positive future with improved human wellbeing

The relative size of these attractors matters enormously:

• Mad Max is big: Attracting approximately 500,000 of the 4 million scenarios, this represents the largest basin of attraction. It appears frighteningly easy for the global system to slide into this catastrophic state.
• Illiberal Democracy and Autocracy: Significant individual attractors exist in this space as well, though collectively they appear to absorb more scenarios than Mad Max.
• Hope is narrow: Drawing in only about 100,000 scenarios, Hope has the smallest basin of attraction among the major outcomes

However, there’s important nuance here. Later analytical runs showed that Hope is a “relatively deep attractor”, meaning that once in its basin, the world systems tend to stay there. It’s a harder equilibrium to reach but stable once achieved.

Succession Analysis

Further research by the CORE Model team will employ a method known as succession analysis (which tracks how inconsistent scenarios migrate through state space toward the consistent scenarios), to deduce the lowest barrier pathways through the model from the world’s present system states to the nearest edge of the hope attractor. This approach leverages the idea of a kind of reverse tipping point, high leverage policy/intervention points that could set off a cascade of transformation into the hope attractor, the system’s natural dynamics would pull us in.

The temporal aspects of the model are complex. Succession analysis functions as “an analogue of time” rather than explicit temporal modelling. The model is essentially “instantaneous” (showing stable states) rather than fully dynamic (showing detailed trajectories through time).

This is both a limitation and a practical necessity as fully modelling the temporal dynamics of 11 coupled systems risks being computationally intractable and would require even more uncertain judgments about rates of change.

The real value of this work emerges in its policy implications. The model isn’t just descriptive, rather it’s designed to identify intervention points.

Hope’s Limitations

However, even the Hope attractor isn’t utopian. As Homer-Dixon emphasised, “Hope is still Hot”, by which he meant that even this positive scenario involves significant climate heating and its associated challenges. The model doesn’t promise a return to pre-industrial conditions or easy solutions, just significantly better outcomes than the alternatives.

Critical Policy Target: Democracy

The analysis has already revealed very clear policy targets. Most notably, according to Homer-Dixon, maintaining democracy appears essential, as without democratic governance, “there appears no way there”, ie, no viable pathway to the Hope attractor emerges in the model.

This finding aligns with the Cascade Institute’s broader work on global systemic stresses, which identifies ideological fragmentation, polarisation, and political-institutional decay as critical stressors undermining humanity’s capacity to respond to other challenges.

Methodological Considerations and Ongoing Work

Homer-Dixon was refreshingly candid about the model’s current status and limitations. He acknowledged the model is “somewhat crude” but argued it provides a foundation for mapping paths toward transformation. This honesty is important, the model isn’t claiming perfect foresight but offering structured insight into complex dynamics. Furthermore, it is fully transparent, so users could adjust the settings according to new evidence. The CORE Model lends itself to modelling interventions that change the present state of world subsystems and deducing likely future states.

Sensitivity Analysis and Refinement

The research team is conducting extensive sensitivity analysis and converging on the “right” approach through iterative refinement. The rules used for succession analysis, Homer-Dixon noted, are “very important and make a difference to outcomes.”

This ongoing refinement is crucial. Early versions of complex models often reveal more about the modellers’ assumptions than about reality. But through systematic testing and adjustment, such models can become increasingly useful.

The forthcoming release of 200 pages of research and rationale supporting the 1,800 expert judgments will provide important grounding. This documentation will allow others to assess the judgments’ correctness and validity.

Next Steps and Using This Work

Homer-Dixon indicated the work is being prepared for publication in Nature, suggesting it will soon face rigorous peer review. He also noted that slide decks, mathematical details, and video recordings will be made available through ASRA’s YouTube channel.

We note that for researchers, policymakers, and organisations working on global catastrophic risk, several opportunities emerge:

For Researchers

• Examine the detailed methodology when published
• Apply similar CIB approaches to regional or sectoral polycrises
• Contribute to refining the expert judgments as new evidence emerges
• Extend the model to explore specific intervention scenarios

For Policymakers

• Use the framework to identify high-leverage intervention points
• Prioritise policies that maintain democracy and international cooperation
• Assess whether current policies push toward Hope or away from it
• Design policies with an understanding of system-level interactions

For Organisations

• Apply polycrisis thinking to strategic planning
• Identify how organisational actions contribute to global system stresses or resilience
• Engage with the Cascade Institute’s broader work on global systemic stresses

Finally, such approaches and tools are exactly the kind of frameworks that we have previously argued are missing from a lot of national risk assessment, so there is much potential to incorporate these methods when addressing global catastrophic risk, see our call for more focus on these issues in our recent peer-reviewed paper on New Zealand’s long-term resilience to global risks.

Conclusion

What makes the Polycrisis Core Model significant isn’t that it predicts the future because it doesn’t and it can’t. What it does is transform our understanding of possibility space.

Before this work, discussions about achieving positive global transformation were largely speculative. We could point to things that needed to change such as carbon emissions, inequality, authoritarian governance, but we lacked a systematic understanding of how these elements interact and which changes might trigger virtuous rather than vicious cycles.

Now, based on the CORE Model’s 1,800 expert judgments and rigorous mathematical analysis, we have something more concrete. The model demonstrates that Hope is possible but narrow, that certain policy targets (especially democracy) appear non-negotiable, and that we need to find ways to push the global system toward that Hope attractor’s basin.

The work is also a further wake up call. Mad Max attracts far more scenarios than Hope. Our default trajectory, absent deliberate intervention, trends toward collapse not transformation. This is something we have also detailed when describing the ‘hard landing ahead’ in previous blogs. This likelihood also means that investment in resilience (to Mad Max) remains a critical hedge for decision-makers (for examples of resilience options see our previous “NZCat” work).

But unlike in previous work, and thanks to the Cascade Institute’s work, we now have tools to map this terrain. We can identify leverage points, evaluate interventions, and design policies with an understanding of system-level consequences. The question isn’t whether transformation is possible, the model shows it is. The question is whether we’ll implement the changes necessary to reach it.

As Ben Okri challenged myself and other attendees at the recent ASRA Symposium: “We have to find better alternatives to the current direction of history.” The Polycrisis Core Model provides not just warning but a roadmap for doing exactly that.

Whether we follow it remains to be seen.

Further Resources:

• Cascade Institute: https://cascadeinstitute.org/
• ASRA (Accelerator for System Risk Assessment): https://www.asranetwork.org/
• Lawrence et al. (2024). “Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement.” Global Sustainability

The webinar recording and slide deck are available on ASRA’s YouTube channel.