By Matt Boyd, Michael Baker, Amanda Kvalsvig & Nick Wilson (cross-posted from the PHCC Blog)
Summary/TLDR
At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, countries responded in a range of ways.
Our new research reveals that those that put in place explicit exclusion/elimination strategies achieved dramatically lower Covid-19 mortality during the critical 2020-21 period.
These jurisdictions recorded negative excess mortality—fewer deaths than expected based on previous years—with -2.1 deaths per 100,000 population, compared with 166.5 per 100,000 in other jurisdictions.
In particular, island jurisdictions with stringent border restrictions experienced substantially better outcomes than non-islands.
Crucially, we found no consistent evidence that stringent border restrictions harmed economic growth compared to jurisdictions with less stringent restrictions.
This finding challenges widespread assumptions about inevitable trade-offs between health and the economy.
The strategic divide in pandemic response
Five years into the Covid-19 pandemic, with an estimated 27.3 million excess deaths globally,1 we now can look back and try to understand which control strategies worked best. This question is important, as the world will face more pandemics in the future, possibly even bioengineered ones.2
There are clear strategic choices around how to manage a pandemic. A mitigation/suppression approach accepts ongoing community spread while aiming to slow transmission. An exclusion/elimination strategy aims to prevent or rapidly eliminate community transmission.3
Our new peer-reviewed paper published in PLOS Global Public Health,4 identified five jurisdictions that explicitly pursued exclusion/elimination strategies: Australia, China, New Zealand, Singapore, and Taiwan. These weren’t just jurisdictions with low case numbers—they had exclusion/elimination goals and designed comprehensive policies and programmes around them.
Border restrictions
Central to exclusion/elimination strategies were stringent border restrictions. We analysed when jurisdictions reached maximum border closure (Oxford Stringency Index Level 4) and for how long they maintained these controls. Most jurisdictions (82.8%) eventually reached Level 4 restrictions, but the duration varied dramatically. Oceania maintained the longest median duration (768 days), while Western Europe had the shortest.
Very different health outcomes
The excess mortality differences through 2020–2021 were stark:
Explicit exclusion/elimination jurisdictions:
Mean age-standardised cumulative excess mortality: -2.1 per 100,000 (negative excess mortality)
All other jurisdictions:
Mean age-standardised cumulative excess mortality: 166.5 per 100,000
Figure 1: Age-standardised cumulative excess mortality per 100,000 for 2020–2021 by jurisdiction type and strategy4
Island jurisdictions overall experienced much lower mortality (64.8 per 100,000) compared to non-islands (194.3 per 100,000), regardless of strategic approach.
Among jurisdictions implementing Level 4 border restrictions, we found powerful correlations between restriction duration and reduced mortality—but only for islands. That is, in island jurisdictions, the longer border restrictions were in place, the lower the excess deaths. In our regression model accounting for GDP per capita and border restriction duration, these two factors alone explained approximately 58% of the variance in these mortality outcomes (with border restriction duration showing a stronger statistical association with mortality than GDP).
Governance quality: A critical factor
When we controlled for government corruption in our analysis, the picture became more nuanced. The protective effect of border restrictions weakened considerably, while low government corruption itself emerged as a significant predictor of better mortality outcomes.
This finding suggests that effective governance quality, not just border measures alone, was crucial for successful pandemic control. Better-governed jurisdictions (especially the absence of corruption) were more effective at implementing comprehensive public health responses beyond just border restrictions.
One of our most important findings challenges widespread assumptions about health-economy trade-offs. Despite extensive analysis, we found no consistent statistically significant relationships between border measures and GDP growth during the 2020–2021 pandemic period.
The absence of clear economic disadvantages suggests that stringent border restrictions during severe pandemics may not significantly harm economies, relative to those jurisdictions that take other approaches, as is widely assumed.
Figure 2: The relationship between duration of restrictions (days) vs age-standardised cumulative excess mortality for 2020-21 (cube root transformed); Outcomes for non-islands (red) and island jurisdictions (blue) shown seperately.4
Seven success stories
Our paper reports on seven jurisdictions that achieved negative age-standardised cumulative excess mortality during 2020–2021, meaning fewer people died than would be expected in normal times. Six were islands (Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Iceland, Japan, New Zealand, Taiwan) plus Mongolia. All used quarantine for arrivals and most implemented Level 4 border restrictions, demonstrating that exceptional outcomes were achievable beyond just explicit exclusion/elimination jurisdictions.
Conclusions
The Covid-19 pandemic created a natural experiment in control strategies across the 193 jurisdictions studied. The results suggest that exclusion/elimination approaches, particularly when implemented with strong governance, achieved dramatically superior health outcomes without apparent economic penalties.
Conclusions of this study are consistent with other quantitative evaluations of the health impact of the elimination strategy. A comparison of OECD island countriesfound that those that had followed the most proactive exclusion/elimination strategy (NZ and Australia) had the lowest excess mortality.5 They also had relatively good macroeconomic performance compared with countries pursuing a suppression strategy. Previous research also confirms NZ had negative excess mortality during the 2020-21 elimination period.6
As we prepare for future pandemic threats, these insights can inform more proactive approaches. While geography provides some countries with natural advantages, governance quality looks to be an important and modifiable factor in determining pandemic response success. For severe infectious disease threats, the evidence increasingly suggests that exclusion and elimination, rather than acceptance and mitigation, is the path to both better health and economic outcomes.
These findings have implications for NZ as the Royal Commission of inquiry Phase Two prepares to submit its report in February 2026 and the Government then needs to formulate its response.7 They are also relevant to informing global pandemic preparedness approaches led by the World Health Organization.8
What this briefing adds
Jurisdictions implementing explicit exclusion/elimination strategies achieved negative cumulative excess mortality through 2020–21 (-2.1 per 100,000) compared to others (166.5 per 100,000), representing the clearest evidence of the impact of a strategic approach on pandemic outcomes.
Duration of maximum border restrictions strongly predicted lower mortality in island jurisdictions, but this effect may be partially due to governance quality rather than border measures alone.
No consistent relationships emerged between stringent border measures and GDP growth, challenging assumptions about inevitable health-economy trade-offs.
Implications for policy and practice
Future pandemic preparedness should prioritise exclusion/elimination strategies for more severe threats, where geographically and governmentally feasible, particularly for island jurisdictions and countries with strong institutional capacity.
Investment in governance quality may be as important as specific pandemic policies, since response effectiveness depends heavily on successful implementation.
Further work is needed to extend and validate this research, including: refining the pandemic response classification of specific jurisdictions; extending the analysis of well-being and economic factors beyond the first two pandemic years; and investigating the role of governance factors.
References
Mathieu E, Ritchie H, Rodés-Guirao L, et al. (2020) – “COVID-19 Pandemic” Published online at OurWorldinData.org. Retrieved from: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus [Online Resource]
Baker MG, Wilson N, Blakely T. Elimination could be the optimal response strategy for covid-19 and other emerging pandemic diseases. BMJ. 2020 Dec 22;371. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m4907
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) https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgph.0004554
Plank MJ, Senanayake P, Lyon R. Estimating excess mortality during the Covid-19 pandemic in Aotearoa New Zealand. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2025 Aug;54(4):dyaf093. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssmph.2025.101827
Baker MG, Durrheim D, Hsu LY, Wilson N. COVID-19 and other pandemics require a coherent response strategy. Lancet. 2023 Jan 28;401(10373):265-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)02489-8
By John Kerr, Matt Boyd, & Nick Wilson (Blog crossposted from PHCC ‘the Briefing‘)
TLDR/Summary:
There is increasing concern over catastrophic threats such as nuclear conflict, engineered pandemics, and emerging technologies including artificial intelligence. Our just published survey research shows New Zealanders want their government to take these risks seriously. Majority public support for planning and strategy on risks underscores the need to move beyond analysis and invest in practical preparedness. Yet Aotearoa New Zealand remains underprepared, with vulnerabilities in areas such as energy security and industrial inputs needed for food production.
Building resilience will require more than technical planning: trusted communication, cross-sector leadership, and public engagement are vital to maintain legitimacy and consensus. The findings highlight a need for policymakers to align with public expectations by developing a national strategy, strengthening institutions, and broadening the voices involved in planning for worst-case scenarios.
Introduction
Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ), like all nations, faces the possibility of extreme events that could cause global or civilisation-level disruption. These global catastrophic risks include nuclear conflict, bioengineered pandemics, major volcanic eruptions, severe space weather, and potentially runaway artificial intelligence (AI). While the probability of any one event is low in a given year, the potential consequences are so severe that preventive efforts and proactive planning are essential.1, 2
Our survey of more than 1,000 New Zealanders provides evidence on how the public views government responsibility for these risks (Figure 1). The results, published in the journal Risk Analysis, show majority support for greater action – but also raise questions about gaps in trust, communication, and institutional readiness.3
Source: Kerr, Boyd & Wilson, 2025; Based on sample of 1,012 NZ adults, collected in 2024. Weighted to match NZ population on age, gender, education and ethnicity.
Key Findings from the Survey
Two-thirds of New Zealanders (66%) support government developing specific plans for catastrophic risks such as nuclear war or engineered pandemics.
A clear majority (60%) also back establishing a dedicated commission or agency to monitor and report on these risks.
Outright opposition is small (8–15%), but about a quarter of respondents are neutral or unsure, suggesting limited awareness or competing priorities.
Support for government planning increases with age, education, income, and trust in scientists.
Unlike many public health issues, there were no major differences in policy support across political orientation, gender, or ethnicity.
Overall, this suggests majority support across the political spectrum for government leadership on catastrophic risks. Trust in science stands out as the strongest predictor of support, highlighting both an opportunity and a vulnerability for building consensus.
Why this Matters Now
Although NZ has previously examined catastrophic risks – for instance, through work in the 1980s on nuclear war4, 5 – resilience has waned. Recent expert reviews conclude that Aotearoa remains poorly equipped to cope with global shocks, despite being relatively well placed geographically to weather them.6, 7
The contrast between strong public support and limited government preparedness is striking. In a 2021 review, Sir Peter Gluckman and Dr Anne Bardsley highlighted major gaps in national planning for high-impact risks.8 More recent work has shown vulnerabilities such as reliance on imported fuel for food production, despite NZ’s apparent self-sufficiency in food supply.6, 9
This new survey reinforces earlier evidence. The Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s 2024 National Risks Public Survey found overwhelming support for government responsibility in managing threats from emerging technologies and critical infrastructure disruption.10 Our findings extend this picture, showing that the public also endorse forward planning for the very worst-case scenarios.
Understanding Ambivalence and Opposition
A significant minority of New Zealanders remain neutral or opposed to stronger government action. Possible reasons11 include:
Low awareness of catastrophic risks and their likelihood.
Fatalism – a belief that little can be done to prepare.
Distrust in government or science as credible actors.
Competing priorities, with attention focused on more immediate social and economic concerns.
This points to the need for broader engagement beyond surveys. Deliberative methods such as citizens’ assemblies, public forums, and focus groups could help unpack how people weigh catastrophic risk planning against other policy demands, and identify framings that resonate across diverse groups.
Trust as a Foundation
The finding that trust in scientists is the single most consistent predictor of support is particularly important. While scientists are central to identifying and communicating extreme risks, they are not always the most effective messengers. For people with low trust in science, other credible voices – such as iwi leaders, community representatives, or political figures across the spectrum – may be more effective in building support.
This echoes lessons from public health communication during the Covid-19 pandemic, where trust was both an asset and a fault line. Building a coalition of trusted messengers will be vital for gaining broad consensus on preparedness.
Policy Implications
The survey adds to mounting evidence that NZ needs to go beyond the hazards it currently plans for (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and severe space weather) to address all major catastrophic risks. Several policy options merit urgent consideration:
Develop a national strategy for global catastrophic risks – building on the National Risk Framework but extending it to worst-case scenarios.8
Establish a dedicated agency or commission, either domestic or in partnership with Australia12, to monitor, assess, and coordinate responses to these risks.
Invest in resilience measures that reduce vulnerabilities exposed in recent studies, such as energy security for ensuring food production.9, 13
Engage the public through deliberative processes to deepen understanding of trade-offs and maintain legitimacy.
Broaden communication approaches, pairing scientific expertise with trusted community and political voices.14, 15
Moving from Analysis to Action
As we noted in an earlier PHCC briefing on the NZ Government’s work on hazards16, progress has been made in recognising some major threats, but important gaps remain.
NZ’s geographic position makes it one of the countries most likely to endure in certain global catastrophes. But survival advantage will only matter if we have invested in resilience and governance structures in advance. Public opinion is clear: most citizens want government to prepare for the unimaginable, before it is too late.
What is New in this Briefing?
Risk scholars and other experts are increasingly concerned about the high-impact threats of global catastrophic risks such as severe engineered pandemics, nuclear war and rogue AI.
The majority of New Zealanders support broad Government action to plan for global catastrophic risks.
Few New Zealanders are actively opposed to policies addressing catastrophic risks, however a quarter (~25%) are unsure or ambivalent.
Implications for Policy and Practice
More in-depth research is desirable to understand why some people are unsure or opposed to Government action.
Nevertheless, it is now over to policymakers to respond to the majority public support for better Government planning and infrastructure to identify and prepare for global catastrophic risks.
Kerr J, Boyd M, & Wilson N. (2025). Public Attitudes to Responding to Global Catastrophic Risks: A New Zealand Case Study. Risk Analysis. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.70096
Wilson N, Prickett M, & Boyd M. (2023). Food security during nuclear winter: A preliminary agricultural sector analysis for Aotearoa New Zealand. The New Zealand Medical Journal (Online), 136(1574), 65-81.
Boyd M, Ragnarsson S, Terry S, Payne B, & Wilson N. (2024). Mitigating imported fuel dependency in agricultural production: Case study of an island nation’s vulnerability to global catastrophic risks. Risk Analysis https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.14297.
Balog‐Way D, Mccomas K, & Besley J. (2020). The Evolving Field of Risk Communication. Risk Analysis, 40(S1), 2240-2262. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13615
Matt Boyd presenting to Environment Canterbury on 10 Sept 2025 – View the recording here
The following is a transcript of our invited presentation to the Environment Canterbury regional council on 10 Sept 2025 as part of Council’s external speaker series and in support of a food resilience strategy.
You can click to watch the recorded version which is followed by Q&A with the councillors.
You can also access slides from a similar presentation Nick Wilson gave at the International Conference on Urban Health (Wellington, 18 Nov, 2025).
Introductory Remarks
Thank you for the opportunity to speak today.
I’m Matt Boyd, Executive Director of Islands for the Future of Humanity, a non-partisan NZ charity disseminating risk information. And I’d like to acknowledge the logos on this slide representing the contributions of various other people to our work.
Slides are as they appeared at the presentation
This talk is about 16min and covers food system resilience.
In my work, that means ensuring the local population can eat enough to survive indefinitely, no matter what the circumstances.
First, I’d like to describe some relevant context, then we can address what can be done.
What is the Risk Context?
Disaster Risk Reduction efforts have advanced a lot.1 However, these efforts focus almost exclusively on climate change and natural hazard risks.
Missing from disaster risk reduction frameworks are Global Catastrophic Risks—often overlooked because many of them are human-caused or because they originate elsewhere (probably outside NZ) and spread, through cascading impacts, to severely affect the entire world, beyond a point where response systems can cope.
We insure our houses against worst possible risks, despite low likelihood, because the harm would be unbearable. We need to apply this thinking to societal resilience.
But there’s more. Global human systems face failures because they are stressed by at least 14 rising global stresses: climate change is one, but there is also biodiversity loss, demographic changes, concentration of industrial food production, emerging AI risks, etc. We need to consider this portfolio.
Basically, we have stresses elevating all kinds of global systems into a precarious state, such that major triggers (eg global hazards, wars, policy changes) could tip stressed systems into crisis. The stress-trigger-crisis model,2 represents this situation and provides tools for thinking about it.
Furthermore, our systems—food, energy, transport, communications—are densely interconnected, with stress in one causing feedback, potential amplification of problems, contagion across systems and cascading effects.
This creates continuous crisis—polycrisis—difficult to escape without addressing root causes:
such as rivalry, inequality, exponential change, and unfettered resource extraction.
In the face of this, organisations like the ASRA network (whose symposium I was at in Paris in June) are developing tools that decision makers can use to apply systemic risk thinking to their risk management.
Why should NZ care about this?
Given this documented global context, NZ should be worried.
We need resilience to absorb these problems and public institutions play a critical role.
But NZ is also relatively well-placed to weather this storm.
For example, the figure on the left shows the expected global cooling following a regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan,3 you see agriculture would collapse in the Northern Hemisphere, but that islands suffer less. The same is true for global winter caused by very large volcanoes.
Additionally, islands with potential for strict border control are less susceptible to health effects of pandemics.
We have studied these various island resilience factors;4 The UK newspaper The Sun reports our work in the right figure – NZ could be one of the most resilient places given our geography, resources, and our social systems.
But islands like NZ need to organise themselves and actually harness their natural advantages, and this only works if we are smart about resilience to global risks and play a careful long game.
NZ is not most at risk from the Alpine Fault (though this is a severe problem)
NZ is most at risk from trade and supply collapse—a downstream consequence of basically all the global risks I’ve mentioned so far.
A major volcanic eruption in Indonesia could blanket Asian ports with metres of ash.
Catastrophic electricity loss or cyber-attack could disable GPS and shipping portside operations.
Nuclear war over Taiwan would cause far more supply harm than one stuck ship in the Suez canal.
NZCat
Our multidisciplinary NZCat research project studied these problems through 2023.5
We created hazard profiles, conducted workshops, a survey, interview study, document reviews, technical research, and hosted a webinar. We spelled out these risks and identified resilience options.
This included food.
We found that our food system’s operation depends on the world. Without imported liquid fuel, fertiliser, agrichemicals, seed, expertise, machinery, spare parts, functioning electricity and internet, NZ’s food production, processing and distribution grinds to halt in its current state.
It is even worse if yields are reduced due to smoke in the atmosphere in a nuclear or volcanic winter.
This is bad for NZers and bad for export recipients depending on NZ food.
It is worst for economically disadvantaged people unable to afford scarcity pricing or source alternatives.
Good risk governance and risk management is key.
Risks need to be visible to the community and discussed.
Sometimes we think we’re already resilient, but local research shows many cases of supposedly redundant NZ systems susceptible to the same risks as primary systems. For example: parallel buried gas pipelines in Taranaki often run through the same topographic corridors being vulnerable to the same volcanic lahars.
For a full presentation of the NZCat project work you can watch the Korero on Catastrophe we held with diverse experts in 2023.
Turning to Food Security:What can be done?
I’ve deliberately spent half this talk NOT discussing food because the context I’ve just outlined needs to be better understood by the public and decision-makers.
This context of: Ordinary disaster risk, global catastrophic risk, global systemic risk, polycrisis, and dependence on trade and supply, is critical to food security.
Export foods, crop choices & liquid fuel
Growers require industrial inputs, crops must thrive despite climate, food must be transported to processing and consumption, sustainably, at levels feeding the local population indefinitely.
So, we need systems in place that can easily pivot export food to the local market if needed.
Some have already argued for a two-track New Zealand food system, with product from the farmgate going directly to the local market as well as to export processing.
We may need frost-resilient crops like wheat and carrots to sustain yields in potential volcanic or nuclear winter.
Most importantly: we need to ensure supply of inputs like liquid fuel.
MBIE has raised this issue with a Draft NZ Fuel Plan proposing increased tankerage, domestic fuel storage, and small-scale refining options.
Our research shows how much difference crop choices can make and how much locally produced liquid biofuel might be needed in a trade collapse. Let’s take a look:
For a detailed explanation of this figure see here
In our paper on mitigating imported fuel dependency,6 we noted that New Zealanders collectively need 4 trillion kcal per year and 150,000 tonnes of protein. So what does that look like?
This square represents the entire scope of NZ land used for dairy farming (1.7 million hectares). This is how much wheat we grow, and this is potatoes.
If you wanted to supply all that protein and food energy using just dairy, you’d need a supply of industrial inputs to farm this much land (640k ha in the figure). If you grew only wheat, this much (117k ha), and only potatoes, this much (84k ha).
Now if you needed to produce liquid fuel locally for the machinery, you’d need 32,000 ha of a feedstock like canola seed to do the dairy farming. You’d need 10,000 ha for potatoes, and only 4.5k hectares for wheat.
The choice of what is produced has massive implications for inputs like fuel. Any resilience programme should consider these factors.
We can drive home the point on this next slide:
This shows how much liquid fuel is needed to conduct the agriculture to feed NZ depending on whether we do dairy, grow potatoes, or wheat, and whether produce is transported 20, 50, or 100km. And whether the skies are darkened by nuclear or volcanic winter or not. You can see it makes a huge difference to certain logistics.
Let’s look at urban agriculture.
Urban and near-urban agriculture
Urban agriculture brings production near to the population, eliminating transport fuel, and some off-road fuel. We analysed Palmerston North (chosen as a median sized city)7 and I’ll talk you through that:
This blue circle represents the built urban area, to scale, at 3400 hectares. If you planted every available green space, parks, gardens, golf courses, for urban agriculture (730 ha) with highest yield crops, you can meet the full food needs of up to 20% of the city.
But you only need a relatively small amount, about 1000 hectares in the case of Palmerston North, of city adjacent land, with high yield industrial cultivation (eg potatoes, wheat) to make up the shortfall.
And a relatively small 100 hectares of a biofuel feedstock could provide the liquid fuel needed. The near urban growing could follow a transport route such as an electric railway.
The main point is this: feeding a city or region doesn’t require much land or fuel if done cleverly. But each region needs to understand its minimum needs and secure this minimum before any catastrophes, assuming no imports.
Of course, urban and near-urban agriculture raise land use and zoning issues.
Urban and near-urban agriculture also require productive soils, which could be prepared in anticipation through green waste to compost schemes.
What can ECan do?
ECan could commission a formal study mapping these problems and generating local resilience options, including analysis of who would be worst affected.
This could form the basis for serious public consultation on options and trade-offs via citizen’s assemblies/citizen juries.
For context, our Palmerston North analysis cost ~NZ$30k—not bank-breaking stuff when it can spark such important conversations.
Our national NZCat analysis included a suggested national Food Security Plan for nuclear war/winter. Here’s some key points:
Ideally, resilient food production could occur throughout a weeks- or months-long electricity loss (a possible consequence of solar storms flagged by NEMA in their new Space Weather Plan). We have provided a free webinar, expert interview, and panel discussion on Managing the Risk of Catastrophic Electricity Loss.
But overall, to help ensure basic food needs can be met, no matter what happens, ECan could champion something like this 12-point plan:
Include global catastrophic risks in local risk planning and governance
Advocate for central government responsibility for basic needs during catastrophes
Facilitate public discussion on catastrophic risks and resilience
Promote 10-day household food storage (vs. current 3-day standard)
Convene cross-sector working groups for contingency planning
Plan low-fuel food production with frost-resistant crops post-catastrophe
Protect near-urban land for high-yield crop production
Support urban agriculture and community food knowledge
Prepare to redirect export food to domestic markets
Plan food transport without liquid fuels through electrification
Develop compost from urban waste for soil improvement
Incentivize high-yield farming near cities over energy-intensive production
Food Resilience
So the objective is: everyone eats, no matter what
The strategy is: increase food system resilience to GCR
And the tactics are: near-urban agriculture, crop selection, local fuel supply…
I’m very happy to take questions and point you to websites with all the research work I have talked about.
Thank you again for this opportunity to speak.
References
UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction. (2025). Global Assessment Report 2025: Resilience Pays: Investing and financing for our future. United Nations. https://www.undrr.org/gar/gar2025
Lawrence M, Homer-Dixon T, Janzwood S, Rockstöm J, Renn O, Donges JF. Global polycrisis: the causal mechanisms of crisis entanglement. Global Sustainability. 2024;7:e6. doi:10.1017/sus.2024.1
Mills, M. J., O. B. Toon, J. Lee-Taylor, and A. Robock (2014), Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict, Earth’s Future, 2, doi:10.1002/2013EF000205.
Boyd, M., & Wilson, N. (2023). Island refuges for surviving nuclear winter and other abrupt sunlight-reducing catastrophes. Risk Analysis, 43, 1824–1842. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.14072
Boyd M, Payne B, Ragnarsson S, Wilson N. (2023). Aotearoa NZ, Global Catastrophe, and Resilience Options: Overcoming Vulnerability to Nuclear War and other Extreme Risks: Report by the Aotearoa NZ Catastrophe Resilience Project (NZCat). Reefton: Adapt Research Ltd
Boyd, M., Ragnarsson, S., Terry, S., Payne, B., & Wilson, N. (2024). Mitigating imported fuel dependency in agricultural production: Case study of an island nation’s vulnerability to global catastrophic risks. Risk Analysis, 44, 2360–2376. https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.14297
Boyd M, Wilson N (2025) Resilience to abrupt global catastrophic risks disrupting trade: Combining urban and near-urban agriculture in a quantified case study of a globally median-sized city. PLoS One 20(5): e0321203. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0321203
Have your say on the DPMC’s Insights Briefing by 27 August
Background
New Zealand public sector agencies must prepare a ‘long-term insights briefing’ every three years. This is an opportunity to look beyond short-term political cycles and use foresight to see what really matters to New Zealand over the longer course.
In 2025 DPMC has collaborated with the National Hazards Board, and the Ministry for the Environment to produce a draft Briefing on “Building Resilience to Hazards“.
In the present global ecological and geopolitical context it seems nothing could be more important and the document is currently out for public consultation.
We have submitted feedback on this Briefing. The opening paragraphs of our submission read as follows:
Introduction
Islands for the Future of Humanity commend the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (DPMC), National Hazards Board, and Ministry for the Environment for producing the Draft Long-Term Insights Briefing (LTIB) on Building New Zealand’s Long-Term Resilience to Hazards (2025). It is clear that considerable effort has gone into framing resilience as a long-term national priority, one that reaches beyond the short-term horizons of electoral cycles. The LTIB recognises that resilience is essential not only for hazard response but also for long-term wellbeing and prosperity. This acknowledgment is timely and welcome.
This submission offers constructive feedback aimed at strengthening the LTIB. Specifically, we argue for expanding the scope of hazards considered, embedding a systemic and evolutionary risk framework, ensuring that the focus of government is on safeguarding basic needs in all circumstances, and advancing institutional reforms that guarantee transparency, accountability, and informed consent. We also highlight the importance of reframing resilience as an opportunity for national growth, rather than primarily a narrative of risk and trade-offs.
By adopting these improvements, the LTIB has the potential to position New Zealand as a global leader in anticipatory governance of global risks and hazards.
You can read our full submission here (PDF, 12 pages).
Do you agree with us? Public consultation is open until 27 August, you can have your say by completing the simple online form found here.
Consider donating
If you support our project of providing non-partisan evidence-based information and options to support resilience to global catastrophic risks, then consider donating to help our charity Islands for the Future of Humanity.
Your support allows us to continue producing risk information and resilience options that could benefit New Zealand and the world.
Do these NZ government draft plans adequately address national resilience?
TLDR/Summary
The NZ Government is consulting on two major draft plans: the National Infrastructure Plan and the National Fuel Security Plan.
Our charity, Islands for the Future of Humanity, submitted responses to both, urging stronger planning for global catastrophic risks (GCRs) like nuclear war, extreme pandemics, or trade collapse.
We find both plans lack adequate preparation for long-term or extreme global disruptions or global critical infrastructure destruction.
Our recommendations include more focus on infrastructure essential for providing basic needs like water, food, transport and communications in the worst possible scenarios, such as trade isolation.
We also propose mandatory resilience assessments in all infrastructure investment decisions, explicitly addressing potential global catastrophes.
Submissions are open: help shape NZ’s future resilience before the deadlines—6 August (Infrastructure) and 25 August (Fuel Security).
Two critical government consultations
The New Zealand government has called for submissions on drafts of two major plans pertaining to national infrastructure and fuel security.
The NZ Infrastructure Commission and the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) have asked how we can future-proof the systems that keep our country running.
Our non-partisan independent charity Islands for the Future of Humanity has made submissions on both, advocating for a bold shift in how we think about resilience: not just to climate change or short-term shocks, but to global catastrophic risks (GCRs) that could fundamentally alter New Zealand’s operating environment.
We find that neither draft satisfactorily addresses global catastrophic risk. We need to ask more of our decisionmakers to ensure national resilience and future wellbeing.
Government plans need to ensure basic needs like food, water, transport and communications can be provided no matter what catastrophes befall the world.
The Draft National Fuel Security Plan, released by MBIE, proposes stockholding obligations, better data visibility, expanded fuel storage, and support for biofuels and EVs. The Plan builds on the 2025 Fuel Security Study, which modelled a severe 90-day disruption to fuel imports (and which we critiqued in a previous post finding the analysis wanting). While welcome progress, the draft plan stops short of addressing how New Zealand could survive a prolonged or permanent disruption to global fuel supply—such as from nuclear conflict, electromagnetic pulse, or widespread supply chain collapse. These are not science fiction; they’re now being actively studied by global agencies, including the US National Academies of Sciences and a new UN Scientific Panel on nuclear war impacts (see our previous post on these reports).
In our submission, we call for a fuel system that guarantees basic needs—food, water, critical transport—under even the worst scenarios. That means modelling fuel demand for essential services in year-long (or longer) disruptions, and developing domestic liquid fuel production capacity, especially regionally distributed biofuel refineries that can pivot between commercial and crisis modes. Electrification is essential, but we must also prepare for shocks that knock out the electric grid itself, as detailed in our recent webinar and expert panel discussion on catastrophic electricity loss.
Meanwhile, the Draft National Infrastructure Plan, published by the NZ Infrastructure Commission, takes a broad look at long-term investment challenges. It rightly addresses fiscal constraints, climate resilience, and aging infrastructure—but barely mentions the possibility of catastrophic global disruption, yet the risk of this is clearly rising, as we’ve discussed in a previous post. Our submission urges the Commission to embed systemic risk and GCR thinking into infrastructure planning, including:
Distributed and resilient energy and food systems,
Domestic cloud and communication infrastructure,
Transport redundancy across islands and to Australia, and
Pandemic-ready health facilities and critical supply sovereignty.
We also argue for mandatory resilience assessments in infrastructure funding decisions, contemplating catastrophic risk scenarios, and using long timeframes and appropriate discount rates that don’t marginalise future generations.
Both submissions draw on our wider work, including our NZCat Report, which maps how island nations like New Zealand are vulnerable to GCRs, but with foresight can play a vital global role in preserving human civilisation through catastrophe—if we plan accordingly.
Let’s make sure resilience means more than recovery after the fact, or merely protecting business as usual. It must mean anticipatory governance and preparedness for whatever comes.
Support our work
If you support this kind of thinking and work, then help us free up time to do more. Please consider donating via our NZ registered charity’s givealittle page.
This blog cross-posts a University of Otago media release about our recent research:
Many former leaders of the world’s nine nuclear-armed nations were impaired by health conditions while in office, raising concerns over their decision-making abilities while they had access to nuclear weapon launch codes, a study from the University of Otago, New Zealand, has found.
The study analysed the health information of 51 deceased leaders of nuclear-armed countries: China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States. Eight of the leaders died from chronic disease while still in office, five from heart attacks or strokes. Many of the leaders had multiple serious health issues while in office, including dementia, personality disorders, depression and drug and alcohol abuse.
The research was led by Professor Nick Wilson, from the Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Pōneke, with Associate Professor George Thomson and independent researcher Dr Matt Boyd.
Professor Wilson says that of the leaders who left office while still alive, 15 had confirmed or possible health issues which likely hastened their departure.
“Probably all of this group of 15 leaders had their performance in office impaired by their health conditions. In some cases, the degree of impairment was profound, such as in the case of two former Israeli Prime Ministers: Ariel Sharon, who became comatose after suffering a stroke in office, and Menachem Begin, whose depression was so severe he spent his last year as leader isolated in his home. Impairment during crises was also seen in the case of Richard Nixon’s bouts of heavy drinking – including during a nuclear crisis involving the Middle East.
“There have also been occasions where health information about leaders has been kept secret at the time.”
This was the case for multiple US presidents, including Dwight D Eisenhower, whose doctor described his 1955 heart attack as a digestive upset; John F Kennedy, whose aides lied about him having Addison’s disease, a serious, chronic condition; and Ronald Reagan, whose administration hid the extent of his injuries after he was shot in 1981, and the likely signs of his dementia near the end of his term.
Professor Wilson says Kennedy was in poor health during his first two years in office in 1961 and 1962, with his performance likely impaired from Addison’s disease, back pain, and his use of anabolic steroids and amphetamines. It was in 1961 that he authorised the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and that his poor performance at a Cold War summit with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna was noted. In turn, Khrushchev’s poor mental health probably contributed to him triggering both the Berlin Crisis and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
In France, long-serving President François Mitterrand clung onto power until the end of his term in 1995, despite keeping secret his advanced prostate cancer and after his doctor had concluded in late 1994 that he was no longer capable of carrying out his duties.
This latest study follows previous research involving Professor Wilson on the health of former New Zealand Prime Ministers. It found the performance of at least four of the leaders was impaired, in three cases by poor health, and, in the case of Robert Muldoon, by his heavy drinking.
Professor Wilson says with the rise in international instability following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 it has become even more important to ensure there is good leadership and governance in those countries with nuclear weapons.
“This is particularly the case for the United States, where a leader can in principle authorise the release of nuclear weapons on their own, a situation referred to as a ‘nuclear monarchy’.”
He says there are a range of measures which could reduce global security risks from leaders whose judgement is in question. They include removing nuclear weapons from ‘high alert’ status, adopting ‘no first use’ policies where nations refrain from using nuclear weapons except as a retaliatory second strike, ensuring any weapon launches need authorisation by multiple people, and progressing nuclear disarmament treaties.
Professor Wilson says democracies could consider introducing term limits for their leaders, as well as recall systems, so voters could petition for politicians to step down. Requirements for medical and psychological assessments could be introduced for leaders before they take office, and during their terms.
“Maintaining a strong media with investigative journalists can also help expose impairment in leaders.”
Professor Wilson says politicians in general are exposed to high levels of stress, which can affect their mental wellbeing. A study of UK Members of Parliament has found they were 34 per cent more likely to experience mental health problems than other high-income earners.
“Finding ways to reduce stress on politicians and better address their mental health needs is another way global security risks can be reduced.”
New US National Academy of Sciences Report reveals the complex web of societal vulnerabilities that could amplify nuclear war’s devastating impact
TLDR/Summary
The US National Academy of Sciences has just released a comprehensive report on the “Environmental Effects of Nuclear War”. This work extends analysis beyond physical damage to examine impacts on human social and economic systems.
Chapter 7 reveals that nuclear war’s most severe consequences may come through cascading societal failures rather than direct blast effects, with global interconnections creating “societal teleconnections” that could spread impacts worldwide.
Global crop yields could suffer 3–16% reductions from nuclear winter cooling, while marine fisheries could decline by 30–70%, threatening global food security.
The report identifies fundamental gaps in our understanding of how complex human systems respond to nuclear shocks, calling for unprecedented interagency coordination and advanced modelling.
While acknowledging massive uncertainties, the evidence suggests even regional nuclear conflicts could trigger global disruptions through interconnected trade, financial, and supply chain networks.
Key recommendations call for coordinated US Government assessment, advanced predictive modelling, comprehensive research programmes, health system preparedness, and community resilience initiatives.
We have previously made similar recommendations about the need for post-nuclear-war trade and supply modelling, the need for New Zealand to build resilience and how, and lessons from past volcanic winters.
A System of Systems Under Stress
The National Academy of Sciences’ (NAS) latest report on nuclear war represents a critical evolution in how we understand catastrophic risks. Unlike Cold War-era studies focused primarily on blast radius and fallout, this analysis treats nuclear conflict as a “system of systems” problem, where cascading failures through interconnected human networks may prove more devastating than the initial explosions. I watched with interest the 25 June webinar presentation by the NAS authors, which summarised the findings. Chapters deal in turn with:
Nuclear weapon scenarios and weapon effects
Fire dynamics
Effects of plumes, aerosols, and chemistry
Physical Earth system impacts
Ecosystem impacts
Societal and economic impacts
Although the report inexplicably omits study of the effects of radiation and radioactive fallout, as per their directive from the US Congress, particularly relevant is Chapter 7, which examines the societal and economic impacts of nuclear war.
This Chapter has much in common with our own NZCat Main Report from 2023 on New Zealand’s vulnerability and resilience options to Northern Hemisphere nuclear war (summarised in recent journalistic reporting here).
Chapter 7 provides a sobering assessment of how nuclear war would ripple through the complex web of modern civilisation. The findings reveal that while humanity has grown adept at modelling the physics of nuclear explosions, we remain dangerously ignorant about how human societies collapse and recover under such extreme stress.
Figure source: National Academy of Sciences 2025 Report.
When Food Systems Fail
The agricultural impacts alone paint a grim picture. The report concludes that nuclear winter effects from atmospheric soot could reduce global crop yields by 3–16%, with temperate regions above 30°N—including the United States, China, and Europe—facing the greatest impacts.
The cause of this precipitous drop in yield is the 5–12 teragrams (Tg) of soot that would be thrown high in the atmosphere, blocking the sun.
The large-scale scenario described in Section 2.2.2 could inject 5 to 12.5 Tg of submicron particles in the stratosphere (p.42).
These findings align our own reporting for New Zealand (NZCat Main Report), based on 10–30 Tg of soot, with even further reductions in yield due to cascading shortages of industrial agricultural inputs like imported fuel, fertiliser, seed, and agrichemicals.
Marine ecosystems would suffer as well. The NAS report projects 30% declines in global fisheries catches after a major nuclear conflict, potentially reaching 70% if fisheries are already overfished. These aren’t abstract statistics—they represent the potential collapse of food systems that sustain billions of people.
As the report notes:
Nuclear winter may be one of the most far-reaching public health crisis scenarios, with effects including threats to global food security. Secondary impacts would disrupt transport, food, water, trade, energy, finance, and communication to the detriment of public health efforts (p.169).
The Cascade Effect: When Everything is Connected
Perhaps most concerning is the report’s analysis of “societal teleconnections” (p.155), how disruptions cascade through today’s hyperconnected global systems. Historical examples demonstrate this vulnerability: oil crises, natural disasters, and regional conflicts have repeatedly triggered worldwide food price spikes and economic instability. Nevertheless, the report possibly understates these connection risks, given advancing research in global systemic risk, such as the interaction of algorithms and the potential for deleterious algorithmic collisions in unforeseen circumstances.
In a nuclear conflict scenario, these connections become transmission vectors for catastrophe. Trade networks, supply chains, and financial systems that normally distribute prosperity could instead spread economic collapse. The scale could surpass Covid-19 pandemic disruptions (p.169), with the added challenge that recovery infrastructure might itself be compromised. As we’ve written before, the world needs specific ‘resilience’ infrastructure to call on when business-as-usual has ceased functioning, not merely ‘resilient’ infrastructure.
The NAS report notes that the human toll extends far beyond immediate casualties. Direct health consequences include blast injuries, thermal burns, radiation exposure, and severe mental health trauma. Studies of atomic bomb survivors show increased suicide rates, PTSD, and intergenerational psychological effects that persist for decades. Mass displacement would overwhelm shelter, healthcare, food, and water provision, while psychological impacts could trigger panic, hoarding, and breakdown of civil order. Additionally the webinar panel was explicit that:
It’s difficult to understate the importance of the economic disruptions.
That said, the geographic particulars, and type and number of weapons employed, as well as the targets struck, will all interact to determine the effects of any particular nuclear conflict.
Figure source: National Academy of Sciences 2025 Report.
The Knowledge Gap Crisis
The report’s most troubling finding may be how little we actually know. As the authors acknowledge:
There is a fundamental lack of data, process understanding, and modelling capabilities that prevents researchers and analysts from quantitatively linking specific nuclear war scenarios to precise societal outcomes (p.152).
Current climate models “are not well suited for evaluating the consequences of sudden shocks such as nuclear war” as they focus on gradual changes rather than abrupt disruptions. We lack understanding of ecosystem recovery thresholds, low-dose radiation effects, complex human behavioural responses, and cascading infrastructure failures.
We have noted these shortcomings before and highlighted the need for modelling the potential cascading consequences to trade and supply chain of major catastrophes like nuclear war. Our paper ‘Resilience Reconsidered: The need for modelling resilience in food distribution and trade relations in post nuclear war recovery’, is forthcoming in a Special Issue on Polycrisis and Systemic Risk in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Science. You can read a preprint here.
Without understanding how societies collapse and recover, we cannot effectively prepare for or prevent these catastrophes.
Building Resilience in an Uncertain World
Despite massive uncertainties, the report doesn’t counsel despair. Community resilience, social capital, and preparedness can significantly influence outcomes. Strong governance, robust infrastructure, and social cohesion enable better recovery.
These are investments that benefit society whether or not nuclear war can be prevented. This finding echoes our own mention of a four capitals approach to building resilience to global catastrophic risk, see our report Aotearoa New Zealand, Global Catastrophe, and Resilience Options.
While the prevention of nuclear war must remain a high priority of all governments, countries not contributing to the nuclear arms race (like New Zealand) should consider improving their survival chances. The NAS report’s key recommendations around societal and economic consequences of nuclear war provide a roadmap for action:
Interagency coordination: Major government agencies must develop coordinated assessments of how nuclear war would affect food, water, health, and economic systems.
Advanced modelling: Investment in sophisticated capabilities that integrate climate, agricultural, and economic factors to help policymakers develop contingency plans.
Comprehensive research: Transdisciplinary collaboration to understand climate impacts, ecosystem recovery, and community resilience.
Health system preparedness: Strengthening hospital capacity, public health workforce, and strategic stockpiles.
Community resilience: Research on how social inequities would influence nuclear impacts, with emphasis on local collaboration.
The evidence is strongest for direct agricultural and health impacts, moderate for broader economic disruptions based on historical precedents, and weakest for complex cascading social effects.
But even the moderate-confidence findings paint a picture of civilisational disruption that demands preparation, and preparing to survive nuclear war would benefit preparations for other major global catastrophes too.
Wider Global Context
This US NAS report joins a growing body of work examining the likely impacts of nuclear war, including:
The UN’s recent call for nominations for a scientific panel being established to assess the impacts of nuclear war
Our own NZCat analysis of New Zealand’s vulnerability to Northern Hemisphere nuclear war.
Together, these efforts represent recognition that nuclear threats require serious, coordinated analysis and mitigation options.
As geopolitical tensions rise in 2025, the NAS report’s timing proves prescient. We face an era of increasing instability where nuclear risks intersect with other global catastrophic threats, such as pandemics, climate change, and technological disruption (eg, from artificial intelligence).
Finally, it is a shame that the NAS was so cautious in their assessment of the quality of evidence available. The report seemed to demand very high levels of certainty, yet what we need to know to act is that there is a reasonable chance of major famines and social collapse, and that seems to be that case. The report shied away from using evidence from past volcanic eruptions as any kind of analogue for the climate impacts of nuclear war, yet both events are sun-blocking. Our own work describing impacts and lessons from the 1815 Tambora eruption are examples of this.
Sometimes it is important to acknowledge what we don’t know, but act on “good enough evidence”, rather than wait for perfect understanding. Irrespective of the state of knowledge, we should begin acting now, so we are not too late.
I attended the 2025 European Urban Resilience Forum in Rotterdam and learned the following:
There is a resilience blind spot: European cities excel at climate adaptation but miss the bigger picture—climate change is just one of 14 global systemic stresses that could cascade into catastrophic failures.
Cities like Rotterdam have made advances: Treating cities like accident patients, monitoring vital systems (electricity, water, transport, communications) through cross-sector teams that meet fortnightly, building relationships and understanding system interdependencies.
War is a resilience killer: Geopolitical conflicts from Ukraine to India-Pakistan tensions are overwhelming political bandwidth needed for long-term resilience planning, diverting resources from preparation to immediate survival.
New Zealand’s unique challenge: Our geographic isolation could be either shield or vulnerability—New Zealand needs resilience systems that preserve urban functions when global supply chains collapse, not just protection from local weather events.
We must move beyond simple climate thinking: Nuclear conflict, extreme pandemics, and system-wide failures don’t respect borders—urban resilience must address the full spectrum of global catastrophic risk.
The bottom line: New Zealand must ensure cities can maintain basic human needs (water, food, energy, communications) post-catastrophe, turning our remoteness into strength rather than weakness.
A Judging Panel at the Forum concurred that pilot projects are over—we need systematic approaches that seek to change the mechanics of cities.
Action needs to include cooperation among organisations. At home this might mean NEMA working seriously with the Infrastructure Commission, overseen by Chief Risk or Resilience Officers to build resilient solutions ahead of time.
Graphical recordings of the European Resilience Forum 2025 sessions can be accessed here.
Introduction
I attended the European Urban Resilience Forum (Rotterdam, June 25-27), which brought together city leaders, policy makers, and resilience practitioners grappling with an uncomfortable reality: traditional approaches to climate adaptation may no longer be sufficient in an era of converging and interacting global risks.
Rotterdam’s vice-mayor discussed life six metres below sea level, while Greek innovation seeks to detect wildfires using AI-enabled drones, and Ukrainian municipal officials are balancing climate action against the immediate demands and effects of war. Discussions at the Forum revealed both the promise and limitations of current resilience thinking.
While many European cities are pioneering innovative climate adaptation approaches, there was also a critical blind spot that New Zealand, given its unique geography and vulnerabilities, cannot afford to ignore: the need to build resilience not just to local climate impacts, but to the full spectrum of global catastrophic and systemic risk and the various cascading and interacting effects that could reshape our world.
The State of Play: Europe’s Resilience Foundations
The Forum’s opening session, featuring a video message from Kamal Kishore of the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, established the context that while disaster-related deaths have declined decade on decade, exposure to droughts and seismic risks continues to rise across Europe’s increasingly urbanised landscape. The message was clear, cities house 70% of Europe’s population and face disproportionate climate impacts, but this concentration also presents an opportunity for disproportionate positive impact through targeted urban resilience investments.
Rotterdam’s vice-mayor delivered practical wisdom: we need to make cities green. At six meters below sea level, Rotterdam has learned that green infrastructure—water buffers, reduced concrete, car-free spaces—isn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about heat stress relief, flood management, and public health.
The city’s Roofscape Rotterdam tool allows users to map how 18 square kilometres of roof space could contribute to energy, water management, and other resilience goals, exemplifying the kind of bold and systematic thinking needed.
Our own food system research has recently argued for discussions about land use policy in the context of urban and near urban agriculture for resilience. Similar interactive tools could encourage the public to explore and debate optimal land use policy in New Zealand to balance resilience and development.
A recurring theme at the Forum was multilevel governance with risk ownership at every scale, supported by central government. European officials consistently emphasised the need to move beyond viewing resilience as a cost, instead acknowledging it as essential infrastructure investment that protects people, economies, and existing assets, with figures suggesting every dollar spent on resilience prevents ten dollars in future harm.
Although collaboration was spoken of across many contexts, the most innovative and actioned insights came from Rotterdam’s Maarten Nypels who oversees the Vital Urban Systems programme. Maarten articulated both the theoretical and practical dimensions of addressing our current predicament. He observed that “most crises are manmade”, a point that aligns with metacrisis thinking I’ve outlined in my recent blogs. He noted that humanity needs to understand how we created global and systemic vulnerabilities before we can address them effectively. This was a perspective missing from many reactive resilience solutions.
One of Maarten’s practical solutions is transformative: treat a city like an accident patient whose vital signs need constant monitoring. Rotterdam’s Vital Systems resilience program brings together experts responsible for electricity, water, transport, communications, and data systems in iterative fashion. Meeting fortnightly for three hours, these professionals developed deep understanding of system interdependencies and potential cascading failures, understanding each other’s systems. More importantly, they built the relationships and communication channels that enable rapid coordinated response when crises hit.
This model addresses a fundamental challenge in resilience building: breaking down silos and addressing resilience with cross-cutting approaches, agnostic to the specific hazards, whether climate change or otherwise.
Lessons about the Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts presented by Cedric Grant reinforced this. As a Director of recovery, he provided key learnings such as New Orleans developing five microgrid electrical systems to prevent future total power loss, and collaborating with global experts from the Netherlands on flood protection, but also the learning that childcare availability determines whether people can report to work during recovery. The social infrastructure proved as critical as the physical.
The Blind Spot: Systemic risk and polycrisis
The Forum included a session on the current global polycrisis, in which panellists acknowledged the need for holistic approaches, but the discussion fell short of addressing the full spectrum of systemic and global catastrophic risk.
Climate change dominated discussions, despite being just one of 14 global systemic stresses. The holistic agenda needs to encompass disaster risk reduction, systemic risk (system-wide failures), polycrisis (interacting and cascading risks), the underlying stresses generating these risks, and the underlying drivers of humanity’s current predicament. These drivers include human behaviour, and evolutionary and game-theoretic processes subsumed under the moniker of ‘metacrisis’, just as Maarten alluded.
Visual summary of the session on polycrisis and urban resilience. Image credit: carlottacat.com
The narrow focus on climate mitigation and adaptation becomes particularly problematic when considering New Zealand’s unique position. A recent Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) paper highlighted the crucial intersection between global systemic risk and global catastrophic risk. Nuclear war, extreme pandemics, and supervolcano eruptions don’t just interact with existing vulnerabilities—their effects can amplify through global systems to produce catastrophic outcomes. These systems include many that are not traditionally considered in climate change mitigation and adaptation thinking.
For New Zealand, this intersection is critical. Our geographic isolation, which provides some protection from certain risks (eg pandemics), also creates unique vulnerabilities.
At the Forum, war emerged repeatedly as a barrier to resilience building, not just in Ukraine, but as a persistent drain on political attention and resources. Politicians are overwhelmed by war considerations across multiple theatres. This must be curtailed if humanity is to ensure resilience to the systemic and catastrophic risk we have created. War is accelerating humanity’s race to the bottom.
Lessons for New Zealand Urban Resilience Policy
New Zealand needs to consider the full and real consequences of escalating global war, potential global systemic failures, and the other varied hazards, vulnerabilities, amplifying and latent factors that contribute to global catastrophic risk, especially from the perspective of a remote island nation.
As well as asking how our cities can resist the effects of flooding, cyclones, and heat, while reducing emissions, we also need to be investing in ways to prevent disruption due to lack of industrial inputs like fuel, fertiliser and imported spare parts. We should design our vital systems to be self-contained, diverse, and resilient. We need to anticipate the demands of communications in the event of catastrophic internet failure, how to transport and process food with limited liquid fuel, and how to mitigate harmful mis- and dis-information, and a host of other system wide risks.
New Zealand’s resilience planning must extend beyond climate adaptation and economic resilience to address global catastrophic risks. This means ensuring that vital urban systems—electricity, energy, food supply, transport of critical goods—can operate at minimum levels post-catastrophe. It’s more than planting trees or providing heat shelters; it’s about maintaining basic human needs (like water, food, shelter, energy, transport, communications) when global systems fail. Action such as that which Rotterdam is taking, described by Maarten Nypels, was one of the few examples of genuine resilience building across risks that I heard at the Forum.
New Zealand’s new Space Weather plan, developed by NEMA, exemplifies this challenge. The plan focuses on response but it needs integration with the likes of the Infrastructure Commission’s long-term infrastructure plan to ensure that we’re not stuck in cycles of response and recovery, but rather we build out resilient solutions ahead of time. In London response and recovery teams are now co-located with resilience and prevention teams. NEMA must work with the Infrastructure Commission, and consider systemic risk beyond climate adaptation.
To achieve this upstream investment, finance sessions at the Forum emphasised that investors need detailed plans and predictable contexts. Cities will only be resilient if they’re resilient to the spectrum of Anthropocene risk. For New Zealand, this means building resilience systems that work whether the challenge is climate change, pandemics, or potential Northern Hemisphere nuclear conflict. It means ensuring our remote location becomes a strength rather than a vulnerability.
The conference’s emphasis on Chief Resilience Officers and acceleration of implementation has particular relevance for New Zealand and resonates with much of our previous work, such as our call for a Parliamentary Commissioner for Extreme Risks. Our cities need systematic approaches to resilience that acknowledge our unique vulnerabilities while learning from innovations in Europe and elsewhere.
Judges dispensing sustainability awards at the Forum were clear, that the time of pilot projects is over. Winning entries were visionary, and aimed at changing the mechanics of cities fundamentally.
Conclusions
Much was said and shared at the European Urban Resilience Forum, and I have necessarily focused on just a few themes, namely the need to incorporate an understanding of global systemic and global catastrophic risk in urban resilience programmes.
The Forum demonstrated that the solutions exist, but we need the political will to implement them at scale. For New Zealand, the imperative is clear: we must build resilience systems that address not just the climate crisis, but the full spectrum of global catastrophic risks that could affect our remote island nation.
Perhaps most striking for New Zealand observers is how geopolitical instability emerged as a defining constraint on resilience planning. Ukrainian representatives highlighted the cruel paradox of needing to build climate resilience while resources are diverted to immediate survival. This reality check extends beyond Ukraine—panellists repeatedly noted how global conflicts from Israel and Gaza to Iran to India-Pakistan tensions are overwhelming political bandwidth needed for long-term resilience planning.
For New Zealand, this raises fundamental questions about how our geographic remoteness might be both shield and vulnerability in an era where Northern Hemisphere conflicts, extreme pandemics, or other global catastrophic risks could profoundly impact our resilience assumptions and supply chains. A new wave of resilience action needs to address global systemic and catastrophic risk.
A Tale of Two Conferences Part II: ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium 2025
(In-depth read, 15 min)
The importance of nature was clear at Les Fontaines – venue for the ASRA Symposium. Photo credit: the author
TLDR/Summary
Part II of a two-part blog series reporting on a pair of crisis/disaster risk conferences – this one covers the ASRA ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium, which offered a refreshing contrast to the UN’s symptom-focused approach detailed in Part I.
ASRA brought systems thinking to crisis management – 250 multidisciplinary experts tackled interconnected “polycrisis” issues rather than isolated disasters, focusing on the deeper stresses that drive cascading failures.
Keynote speakers delivered transformation-focused messages – Poet Ben Okri challenged humanity to become “the people our times require,” while Christiana Figueres emphasised that “linear thinking has no place” in addressing systemic risk.
Practical tools emerged alongside theory – ASRA launched STEER, a beta tool for systemic risk assessment, and workshops demonstrated hands-on polycrisis analysis and intervention design using real global stresses and future scenarios.
The hard truth: single solutions won’t work – Whether it’s capitalism, carbon emissions, or specific leaders, there’s no single root cause to our interconnected crises; siloed institutions impede the interdisciplinary approaches we desperately need.
Bottom line: humanity has the frameworks and community, but the race against time continues – ASRA provided genuine hope and practical starting points, but whether this scales fast enough to prevent humanity’s “hard landing” remains the crucial question.
Definitions
Global systemic stresses: long-term processes that weaken the resilience of critical global systems by increasing pressures, sharpening contradictions, and expanding vulnerabilities. These stresses make systems more vulnerable to trigger events that push them into a crisis.
Polycrisis: The simultaneous occurrence of multiple, interconnected crises that exacerbate each other, creating a situation more severe than the sum of its parts. It’s not just a collection of unrelated crises, but rather a situation where different crises interact and amplify the negative impacts of each other.
Systemic risk: The potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems. Systemic risk implies the potential for system-level breakdown and cascading consequences across human and natural systems.
Metacrisis: In this blog ‘metacrisis’ refers to the collection of forces: evolutionary, social, technological, and game theoretic, that drive and give rise to global systemic stresses, and resulting crises, polycrisis, and systemic risk.
Introduction & Context
Twenty-four hours after leaving the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction Global Platform in Geneva, somewhat pessimistic about humanity’s trajectory, I found myself at Les Fontaines in Chantilly Gouvieaux, France, for an entirely different kind of gathering.
The Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) was hosting the ‘Currents of Change’ Symposium – the first transdisciplinary global meeting dedicated to action on systemic risk.
The Symposium offered what the UNDRR Global Platform appeared to miss: clear-eyed analysis of the deeper and interconnected stresses driving cascading crises, coupled with actionable frameworks for addressing them.
ASRA represents a fresh approach to global catastrophic risk. As a network of 90 transdisciplinary experts, it brought together 250 systemic risk practitioners and stakeholders to tackle what ASRA defines as systemic risk: “the potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems.”
Unlike traditional disaster risk conferences focusing on specific hazards, ASRA addressed the underlying patterns generating cascading failures across interconnected systems. The goal: prevent, mitigate, adapt, and transform away from systemic risk before it overwhelms humanity’s response capacity.
Opening Address: Ben Okri’s Call for Transformation
Ben Okri delivers the opening address at ASRA’s Symposium. Photo credit: the author.
British/Nigerian poet and author Ben Okri gave the opening keynote, a moving, powerful account of humanity’s current predicament that immediately distinguished this gathering from conventional policy conferences. As a renowned novelist, Okri brought a different lens that cut through technocratic language to human realities.
“Many things have come into reality that cannot sustain themselves,” Okri observed – capturing what metacrisis theorist Daniel Schmachtenberger had described as humanity’s “self-terminating race” (see Part I).
But rather than dwelling in despair, Okri challenged humanity towards transformation thinking: “We must not make the mistake of thinking that the present will become the future.”
His diagnosis was unflinching. “Nations cannot talk of making themselves ‘great’ at the expense of making the rest of humanity small,” directly addressing the zero-sum thinking that underlies the competitive dynamics driving many global systemic stresses.
Most crucially: “We cannot combat the difficulty of our times as the people we used to be, we have to be fit and healthy, and we have to create wider and wider communities and alliances and we have to fight the evil of our times intelligently.”
This call for intelligent, collaborative action echoed throughout the Symposium’s technical sessions.
Keynote: Christiana Figueres on Transformative Change
The first keynote session saw Christiana Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and architect of the Paris Agreement, demonstrate how systemic thinking translates into concrete action. Her presentation exemplified the Symposium’s approach of inclusive systematic analysis with practical optimism.
“In the face of systemic risk, linear thinking has no place today,” Figueres began, directly addressing the siloed thinking that limited many of the UNDRR discussions I had attended the previous week (see Part I).
We have the technology and understand interconnectedness, she continued, the question is implementation. Furthermore, rather than aiming to minimise our impact, we should actively seek to restore nature, shifting from ‘sustaining’ to ‘regenerating.’
Costa Rica provided her key example, where laws now facilitate payment for environmental services, resulting in increased forest cover from 29% to 55%. This demonstrates how changing incentive structures drives systemic change.
Figueres used the metaphor of a spider web for interactions in complex systems, explaining that we can’t control the web through top-down decrees, but we can observe “which threads are being pulled and how” and identify effects and leverage points where small changes create large systemic shifts.
Christiana Figueres speaking at the 2025 ASRA Symposium. Photo: the author.
Most importantly, Figueres identified a crucial constraint: “The scarcest resources at the moment are kindness and love.” She warned against letting news feeds crowd out genuine learning sources, including learning from the natural world. In a similar vein, I’ve previously blogged on Jaron Lanier’s calls for deleting all your social media ‘right now’, in my post on Covid, Trump, and algorithms.
Panel Discussions: Scale, Speed, and Systemic Solutions
ASRA Symposium panels tackled how we can meet the scale, scope and speed required for transformation. Unlike conferences focusing on incremental improvements, panellists grappled directly with the need to change human systems.
Participants spoke of bold actions, trust, and “crazy imagination.” One participant noted that, “change happens at the speed of trust,” and “we need to be good ancestors, that’s all.”
But the panellists also honestly assessed barriers, noting for example that Ministers of Finance lack technical understanding of systemic risk. We need bold moves in building systemic resilience so that human systems can handle the stress of the transformation that is required to reduce risk in the long term. However, the current efficiency vs resilience trade-off balance is wrong – we’ve built fragile systems optimised for short-term performance. We must stress-test our systems (whether financial, trade, food, or whatever vital system) and ask if the future we’re creating is resilient to the shocks that are increasingly likely. These stress tests require facilitated dialogue and knowledge sharing across the sectors and systems.
On the required foresight, participants emphasized anticipatory governance as key. Long-term efficiency comes through resilience, not optimisation, because iterated disasters and shocks will undermine efficient systems more over time than resilient systems.
Unfortunately, current crisis response follows whack-a-mole patterns addressing symptoms not causes. Humanity lacks the appropriate anticipatory governance, mechanisms to effect system redesign, and cross-border, regional and global coordination. In particular, we need to stop trying to solve global problems with national tools (as this will lead us into the game theoretic traps and harmful zero-sum dynamics).
“We shouldn’t fix the past, we need to build the future. It was these old systems that have led us here,” noted one panellist. Furthermore, we should act with “good enough information and fast enough action” rather than delays in search of perfect knowledge and optimal decisions.
The way the world seems stuck in rigid historical frames and decision processes, maladaptive in a present world of crisis and existential threats, reminds me of a scene in the film No Country for Old Men. Once he has outwitted the hero, villain Anton Chigurh observes:
“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
The world and its legacy rule-based institutions appear to be in a similar bind. A new system of rules and processes is needed, or humanity will be brought “to this”.
Anton Chigurh, the villain in No Country for Old Men, challenges humanity to reflect on our systems and processes. Miramax Films (2007).
Launch of the STEER Tool: Practical Systemic Risk Assessment & Response
At the Symposium, ASRA launched STEER (Systemic Tool to Explore and Evaluate Risks), a tool designed to help users ‘steer’ away from systemic crisis and toward solutions.
Currently in beta, STEER will make systemic risk assessment accessible to organisations, governments, and researchers across all systems and sectors.
STEER represents practical systems thinking and helps users map interconnections (systemic risk assessment) and identify intervention points (systemic risk responses) for systemic impact, rather than analysing risks in isolation. A combination of drop down menus, tutorial material, and prompts for reflection and action guide users through the processes of systemic risk assessment and response.
STEER will be publicly launched later this year, but feedback from conference attendees (all experts on systemic risk) beta testing the platform was very positive.
The ASRA Symposium provided opportunities for attendees to engage in the kind of processes that STEER encourages, through various workshops and side-events. I managed to attend two of these.
Workshop 1: Understanding Systemic Risk as Polycrisis
I participated in a breakout session facilitated by the Cascade Institute. This provided a hands-on polycrisis analysis exercise. The workshop highlighted global stresses and groups plotted possible interactions among these along with the triggers that could tip such interactions into crises. This helps us understand why so much is going wrong at the same time.
The theoretical basis for the Cascade Institute’s approach is their stress-trigger-crisis model. The model shows that stresses push systems toward points where triggers might create disequilibrium (and likely associated harm in human and ecological systems). Even without triggers, inexorable stressors will push systems into potentially harmful new states (eg, as the left hand depression in the figure below becomes shallower). Averting crises requires acting on stresses of three types: pressures, contradictions, and vulnerabilities.
Figure credit: Cascade Institute’s ‘Stress-Trigger-Crisis’ model (2024)
The Institute previously identified 14 global systemic stresses which create cascading failure conditions for humanity, and which must be addressed to have hope of mitigating the present polycrisis (you can read more about these here):
Climate heating
Ecological degradation
Toxicity
Zoonotic disease transfer
Demographic divergence
Concentrated industrial food production
Changing energy supply
Financial interconnectedness
Economic headwinds
Economic inequality
Ideological fragmentation and polarization
Political-institutional decay
Great power hegemonic transition
Propagation of artificial intelligence
Working groups mapped interactions between three assigned stressors each, analysing how crises emerge when triggers act within these interactions. Each crisis can become a trigger within other patterns.
The messy but structured and necessary process to understand complex systemic risk. Photo credit: the author.
For example, my group was tasked with considering interactions among:
North-South demographic divergence
The concentrated nature of industrial food production
Rising economic inequality
Interactions between these factors could be stressed further by events such as a policy shift in migration settings, or synchronous heatwaves in critical food production regions, leading to a crisis of workforce availability and food production, resulting in famine or war, with these crises then being the triggers of other global crises in cascading fashion.
The exercise rapidly demonstrated how current conditions create multiple, interacting, cascading failures – a polycrisis rather than isolated events. And we only considered three of the 14 global stresses!
Crucially, we brainstormed interventions for crisis mitigation through anticipatory action, such as sensible migration policies, sustainability criteria on imports, more heterogeneous distributed food systems, with food system buffers, and policies that alleviate economic inequality to hedge against short-term price shocks.
Key insight: There’s no single root cause of a polycrisis. It is not simply capitalism, carbon emissions, or the actions of particular leaders, but everything in conjunction. Single-point solutions won’t work. Siloed institutions impede solutions, which require interdisciplinary complex systems thinking.
Workshop 2: Preparing for Catastrophic System Failure
Another workshop facilitated by David Korowicz addressed whether catastrophic system failure can be mitigated ahead of time. We contemplated a scenario where (for the purposes of the foresight exercise) a national Cabinet has knowledge that a catastrophe severely decreasing goods, services, and energy access will happen in either 1, 4, or 8 years. Our group was tasked with considering how we would act with such information under the 4-year time horizon.
Roughly the results of our deliberations can be summarised as follows:
Prevent panic while being clear resilience is a fundamental priority and the nation needs to start seriously working to mitigate likely effects of future crises.
Assess physical security and available resources, ensuring physical safety and liaising with trusted international partners.
Strengthen connections at all levels across government and society (families, communities, regions, international).
Analyse complex reactions to crisis – how will people and countries respond? Will there be national hoarding with export controls? Ensure appropriate engagement with behavioural scientists.
Map consequences for energy, transport, food, and communications systems.
Stocktake the minimum functions required to sustain society according to hierarchy of needs (water, food, shelter, energy, etc).
Develop mitigation options for each critical function in context of the catastrophe.
Ensure redundant structures for communications, food, shelter.
Strategic stockpiling while understanding supply constraints from other jurisdictions doing the same.
Roll out incentives for electrification, local biofuels, distributed food production, and other resilience measures.
Sequence and prioritise all interventions for maximum effectiveness.
Admittedly all the above were developed on the fly in half an hour, but the exercise raised two key questions for me.
First, this all sounded incredibly familiar, and is basically the content of our own organisation’s detailed report on New Zealand’s vulnerability and resilience options against the risk of Northern Hemisphere nuclear war.
Recent media reporting on our study can be found here. You can read the rich and detailed report here, which is effectively a maturity model for resilience to global catastrophic risks, including one-page ‘cheat sheets’ for each key sector and for global catastrophic risk management.
Second, why haven’t governments of the world conducted this kind of exercise, and developed and implemented exactly these plans and programmes, in conjunction with their citizens, given the perilous state of the world?
The workshop discussions also highlighted that this kind of resilience doesn’t depend on nationalistic self-sufficiency but on creating systems that are less susceptible to cascading collapses: locally resilient food and energy, regional governance, delinking from fragile global finance, mutual support networks. But also, and importantly, linkages with regional partners, collaborations of nations to ensure trade and supply through investment in strategic infrastructure and plans, and the avoidance of hoarding, which although seems rational for individual jurisdictions, could actually lower the global mean ability to ride out the crisis, creating overall more harm.
Addressing the Causes of Global Systemic Stresses themselves
The workshops demonstrated that there are positive steps humanity can take towards limiting future catastrophe harm, even harm stemming from system-wide failures. We can implement systems thinking, map systemic interactions, develop resilience through anticipatory governance, conduct preparedness exercises, and reduce the human and environmental impact, and therefore depth of the economic harm that global systemic risk threatens.
ASRA’s greatest contribution was acknowledging this challenge while providing concrete intervention tools. Much more work is needed, particularly to address what drives these global stresses, including rivalrous dynamics preventing coordination, exponential technological advancement creating risks faster than assessment is possible, and resource degradation amid coordination failures. The impact of global stress reduction through systems thinking and action may still not be enough, because civilisation’s underlying dynamics don’t support such action. We’re potentially stuck in evolutionarily stable strategies where aggressive, exploitative behaviours outcompete cooperative, long-term alternatives – even when cooperation ensures collective survival.
All that said, the frameworks discussed and exercised at the ASRA Symposium offer genuine starting points for a new cognitive frame and for systemic intervention.
Conclusion: Building on Systemic Foundations
The contrast between the UNDRR Global Platform and the ASRA Symposium was striking and illuminates the limitations of current disaster risk reduction efforts, which are probably largely driven by historic silos.
While UNDRR demonstrated genuine commitment to developing resilience, discussion remained trapped within frameworks addressing symptoms rather than systems. ASRA took a fundamentally different approach, placing difficult systemic questions at the analytic heart. The result was honest assessment combined with practical intervention tools.
Most importantly, ASRA provided a transformation-focused community of practice. The Symposium demonstrated that systemic risk assessment isn’t an abstract academic exercise. It’s an urgent practical necessity for decision-makers navigating interconnected worlds where risks cascade faster than traditional approaches can address. This practical necessity needs to be resourced. Analysts and decision-makers across all vital sectors and systems need time and space to cooperate, coordinate, and hash-out these problems around the same table.
The challenge of disaster risk reduction, building immunity to global catastrophic risks, and transforming human systems away from those that generate these risks remains enormous. Changing competitive dynamics and evolutionarily stable strategies requires changes from individual consciousness right up to global governance.
We can respond and recover from various crises, we can build resilience and mitigate the impact of future crises, we can reduce systemic risk through judicious systems transformation, we can mitigate the polycrisis by minimising the global systemic stresses, but only by intervening on the forces comprising the metacrisis can we prevent global stresses and crises being thrown up again and again, in increasingly severe form.
I reported Daniel Schmachtenberger’s views in Part I. He notes that the race dynamics of humanity are self-terminating. Individual improvement is insufficient – we need to bend the entire arc of human history. Ben Okri echoed this at ASRA: “We have to find better alternatives to the current direction of history.”
But frameworks, tools, and community emerging from initiatives like ASRA provide hopeful foundations and Ben Okri’s challenge echoes as warning and invitation. We cannot combat our times’ difficulties as the people we used to be, but we can choose to become the people our times require.
Whether this mindset and process scales and accelerates quickly enough to bend the arc of human history before the “hard landing” becomes inevitable remains the question.
A Tale of Two Conferences Part I: UNDRR Global Platform 2025
(In-depth read, 18 min)
Kit Miyamoto facilitates a session on Infrastructure for a Resilient Future (UNDRR Global Platform Geneva, June 4, 2025). Photo credit: the author.
TLDR/Summary
Global disaster costs are exploding while responses lag: Direct losses have reached US$200 billion annually, but cascading effects arguably push the true cost to $2 trillion. Despite the comprehensive Sendai Framework adopted by 187 countries, disaster impacts are actually increasing globally.
The UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNDRR) Global Platform (Geneva, June 2–6) made some progress: Thousands gathered with genuine commitment, the World Bank has pivoted to prioritize 80% of disaster funding toward prevention, and there was acknowledgment that current frameworks need to be “more dynamic and powerful” by 2030.
We’re trapped in a systemic bind: The conference focused on early warning, coordination and engagement issues, specific hazards and financing, touching only lightly on the global stressors resulting from present day human systems that generate risks with increasing rapidity and intensity.
There was little discussion of exponential technologies that generate new vulnerabilities faster than we can assess or regulate them, while increasing global connectivity makes systems more fragile to cascading failures.
The meeting missed the deeper “metacrisis“, ignoring the competitive and evolutionary dynamics between nations and corporations that prevent needed collective action. Individually rational decisions lead to collectively destructive outcomes. Disaster risk reduction remains inadequate due to short-term competitive pressures that reward immediate advantage over long-term survival.
Small islands illustrate the impossible position: Island nations face disaster costs up to 64% of GDP from single events, yet they can’t control the global climate, sea level rise or economic systems that generate many risks they face.
Real resilience requires transformation: Rather than just better disaster response, we need to change the fundamental incentive structures and governance mechanisms that generate cascading disasters in the first place.
The world’s current trajectory points to a “hard landing”: My assessment is that without addressing underlying drivers, the mismatch between accelerating risks and response capacity likely means a “hard landing” is ahead. That is, systemic reorganisation in coming decades with reduced global living standards.
Bottom Line: The UNDRR conference showed remarkable dedication to resilience, but until we address the systemic stressors generating risks faster than we can manage them, and the game-theoretic and evolutionary drivers of those stressors, then we’ll remain stuck in an increasingly dangerous reactive cycle.
In Part II of this ‘Tale of Two Conferences’ I’ll present a dash of hope from the second meeting I attended, the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (Paris, June 7–9), which countered some of the despair I felt following the UN Global Platform… Watch this space…
The 2025 UN Global Platform on Disaster Risk Reduction
The costs of disasters continue to spiral upward. In 2020 alone, direct disaster losses reached $200 billion annually, but when cascading and ecosystem impacts are included, the true cost balloons to an estimated $2 trillion. Meanwhile, risks are growing faster than our capacity to address them, disaster risk reduction financing remains woefully inadequate, and high-income countries are discovering they’re not immune—just weeks ago, a Swiss village was wiped off the face of the Earth by a glacier collapse.
Against this backdrop, the UNDRR 2025 Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction convened in Geneva, bringing together thousands of stakeholders to advance the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030. The meeting culminated in an eight-point call to action.
I attended representing Islands for the Future of Humanity, a non-partisan New Zealand charity think tank, focused on enhancing understanding of global catastrophic risk and mitigation options, through technical research, blogs, collaborative webinars, and other resources available to all for free.
The UN conference structure was comprehensive: keynotes, plenaries, high-level sessions, and learning labs, all open to diverse stakeholders. Yet while the discussions were wide-ranging and often insightful, they revealed a critical blind spot that may undermine all our disaster risk reduction efforts: a failure to grapple with the deeper systemic forces, what some analysts call the “polycrisis” and the “metacrisis”, that are driving humanity’s accelerating risk trajectory.
Setting the Stage: Where We Stand
To understand what was missing, it’s worth reviewing where we stand.
The Sendai Framework, adopted by 187 countries in 2015, provides a comprehensive approach to reducing disaster risk through four priority areas:
Understanding disaster risk
Strengthening governance
Investing in resilience
Enhancing preparedness for “Build Back Better” recovery.
The aim is to meet seven global targets by 2030, including substantially reducing disaster mortality, economic losses, and damage to critical infrastructure.
The 2023 Sendai Midterm Review revealed mixed progress at best. While some advancement had been made since 2015, disaster impacts are actually increasing and setting back development gains globally. There’s a significant disconnect between policy development and actual practice, with disaster response still prioritised over prevention. Major shortfalls persist in disaster risk reduction funding, meaningful stakeholder inclusion, and international cooperation. COVID-19 exposed critical risk governance weaknesses and missed opportunities for “building back better.”
The recently adopted UN Pact for the Future (2024) acknowledges in its second paragraph that humanity is “confronted by rising catastrophic and existential risks” that could lead to “persistent crisis and breakdown.” It explicitly recognises nuclear war as an existential threat (p.12) and addresses biorisks, climate urgency, and complex global shocks. Yet implementation mechanisms remain underdeveloped.
This year the 2025 UN Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction (GAR) reported that five hazards—earthquakes, floods, storms, droughts, and heatwaves—drive 95% of economic losses (this of course omits pandemics, which result in more harm than all other disasters combined!). The report notes that the cost of disasters is rising year-on-year and that many impacts are not quantified by key international databases (see Figure).
But these statistics don’t yet include the potential for truly catastrophic tail risks and the 2025 GAR report makes a crucial observation:
The greatest under-estimation of the potential future disaster costs is the blind spot in accounting for possible 1-in-100 or even 1-in-1,000-year events—those that, while having a low probability of occurring can cause catastrophic impacts when they do (p.27).
Our own research concurs with this sentiment and we have previously argued for such low probability high-impact scenarios to be formally included in national risk assessments. Expected annualised harms from catastrophic tails risks, on some analyses, are many fold higher than the sum of impacts of common disasters.
Finally, the new UNDRR Hazard Information Profiles2025 attempt to standardise hazard classification but reveal telling omissions. While they include nuclear agents and radioactive materials as technological hazards, there’s no mention of nuclear war or nuclear winter, despite “armed conflict” being listed elsewhere. Pandemic risks are covered, as are catastrophic asteroid impacts and large volcanic eruptions, but there’s no discussion of food shortages or famines—despite historical evidence that major volcanic eruptions have triggered both through climate impacts.
The 2025 UNDRR Global Platform: Familiar Themes, Persistent Gaps
With the above context in mind, I attended the June 2–6 (Geneva, Switzerland) UNDRR 2025 Global Platform, which featured three preparatory events that set familiar themes:
The Early Warnings for All Multistakeholder Forum aimed to advance global early warning systems by 2027 but identified persistent gaps: under-resourced systems, lack of forecasting data, and financing shortfalls.
The Stakeholder Forum for Disaster Risk Recovery emphasised that stakeholders shouldn’t wait for ideal conditions to act, calling for fast, flexible, open-source data systems and the need to “build forward better” rather than just “build back better.”
The World Resilience Recovery Forum launched a 10-point Action Plan, arguing we should stop prioritising speed of recovery over resilience.
The 10-Point Action Plan launched at the World Resilient Recovery Forum. Source: UNDRR 2025
These themes continued throughout the main conference. A panellist at the session on “Aligning the Sendai Midterm Review with the Pact for the Future” noted that by 2030, the world will need something more dynamic and powerful than current frameworks to meet emerging challenges. The emphasis on “risk-informed investment” was constant. We must stop creating risk through our investments as we build out complex infrastructure systems that create systemic vulnerabilities for those who depend on them.
Multiple sessions addressed financing, with the World Bank pivoting in recent times to providing 80% of disaster financing for risk reduction and preparedness and 0% to response without disaster risk reduction elements. This is a significant shift from 15 years ago when recovery was the focus. Yet the financing numbers discussed were manifestly disproportionate to the scale of the risks the world faces.
Infrastructure resilience received significant attention, with panellists discussing renewable energy transitions, governance transparency, universal accessibility, and nature-based solutions. Yet, evidence was cited that for every dollar invested in infrastructure, 50 cents is wasted due to organisational culture, corruption (or corporate greed/gaming), and similar inefficiencies. This is a sobering reminder that technical solutions alone are insufficient and systems and goals need to incentivise efficient behaviour (this may be particularly salient for the construction sector in my country of New Zealand).
A ‘Fishbowl’ discussion on resilient infrastructure at the UNDRR Global Platform 2025 (Image credit: the author)
The Systemic Risk Session: Missing the Mark
Perhaps most revealing was the session on “Understanding Systemic Risk.” Despite its promising title, the discussion largely focused on familiar territory: the need for cross-sector integration on risk, coordination mechanisms, strategic preparedness drills, incorporating Indigenous knowledge, and expanding beyond natural hazards to address social risks like health and food security.
Brendan Moon of the Australian National Emergency Management Agency described Australia’s National Coordination Mechanismthat provides a model for genuine multi-stakeholder coordination that goes beyond information sharing to address responsibility and communication across sectors.
These are important topics, but they fundamentally missed what “systemic risk” actually means. The panellists discussed breaking down silos and improving coordination, necessary but insufficient responses to the deeper challenge of understanding why risks are accelerating faster than our capacity to manage them and failing to engage with the possibility that human systems could actually collapse under mounting stressors.
Ruth Richardson from the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA) provided one of the few insights that approached the real issue: We need to change the goals of our systems or we won’t overcome the problems. A food system should have the goal of providing nutritious food to everyone, not the goal of providing fast cheap food to whoever can pay.
She announced ASRA’s launch of STEER (still in beta), a system to assess systemic risks and guide action, calling for a radical increase in funding for this work. But even this may not dig deep enough into the polycrisis and metacrisis that is driving humanity’s predicament.
Do we face a Polycrisis?
Thomas Homer-Dixon, a systems theorist and founder of the Cascade Institute, frames the challenge as a debate between those who see our “polycrisis”—the interconnected set of global challenges from climate change to political instability to technological disruption—as merely “history happening” versus those who see it as the result of systemic flaws in our economic and political systems that are driving stressors that are inexorably leading to a dangerous disequilibrium in human systems.
Homer-Dixon identifies four meta-processes driving the polycrisis: increasing energy consumption, disruption to Earth’s energy balance, increasing human biomass, and increasing connectivity among human populations. These processes create conditions ripe for any future failures to cascade across highly connected, homogeneous systems. Exactly the kind of infrastructure networks we’re building out globally in terms of smart cities, global supply chains, food systems, or digital financial networks.
As connectivity increases without corresponding diversity in systems, we create systemic vulnerabilities. A pandemic can spread globally in weeks. A cyberattack can cascade across interconnected financial systems. Supply chain disruptions ripple through just-in-time production networks. Climate change affects agricultural systems worldwide simultaneously. Each trigger can propagate to a crisis and each crisis is a trigger for other crises.
This creates systemic risk.
Systemic Risk:the potential for multiple, increasingly severe, abrupt, differentiated yet interconnected, and potentially long-lasting and complex impacts on coupled natural and human systems – Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment
The great question is whether technological acceleration is net negative (contributing to these problems) or net positive (likely to solve them). This remains unknown, but what’s clear is that our current trajectory is unsustainable.
The Missing Metacrisis: Why Disaster Risk Reduction Can’t Keep Pace
The UNDRR Global Platform was largely focused on specific hazards, climate change adaptation, familiar themes of collaboration, community engagement, early warnings and financing. What wasn’t effectively discussed were the fundamental drivers of how humanity has ended up in a predicament where risks are increasing faster than our ability to respond. This a critical omission that undermines virtually all disaster risk reduction efforts.
Several analysts have previously identified this deeper pattern. Daniel Schmachtenberger describes what he terms a “metacrisis”. The metacrisis is characterised by systemic mechanisms underlying all other stressors and crises. Humanity is caught amid rivalrous dynamics where competition between actors (nations, corporations, individuals) prevents the coordination needed to address collective threats. Exponential technological advancement creates new risks faster than we can assess or regulate them. Resource degradation accelerates while coordination failures prevent effective response. This has led to what Schmachtenberger calls a “sensemaking crisis”—we literally don’t see the problem at the right level of analysis and don’t understand it.
The result is a kind of systemic trap. If we continue on our current path, Schmachtenberger argues, we face either chaotic breakdown or totalitarian restriction of freedoms as authorities attempt to manage escalating crises. Neither outcome preserves what we value about human civilisation. The challenge is to find a “third attractor,” namely a path that avoids both outcomes through fundamental systemic change.
I did not hear this conversation at the UNDRR Global Platform – literally the world’s premiere meeting on disaster risk.
The problematic dynamic has been described metaphorically in terms of “Moloch” (a word sometimes used to describe an ancient bull-headed demon) – a situation where individually rational decisions lead to collectively irrational and destructive outcomes. Each actor, whether a nation, corporation, or individual, faces incentives that make immediate competitive advantage more important than long-term collective survival. It is a classic but nuanced game-theoretic bind, from which we may fail to escape.
Both Homer-Dixon and Schmachtenberger point to a crucial insight: elite institutions and individuals often lack the cognitive framework to understand these meta-level dynamics. They remain focused on specific problems rather than the systemic patterns that generate multiple problems simultaneously.
The Consequences of Missing the Metacrisis
This analytical blind spot has profound implications for disaster risk reduction. All the coordination mechanisms, financing innovations, data and technological solutions discussed at the UNDRR conference operate within a system that continues generating risks faster than we can manage them, driven by forces beyond any agent’s control. It’s like trying to bail out a boat without addressing the fact that someone is drilling new holes in the hull.
Consider the disconnect: we know that investing in disaster risk reduction provides returns of 15:1 in some cases (meaning that $1 invested in disaster risk reduction averts $15 of recovery costs down the line). Yet financing remains inadequate. We know that “building back better” after disasters makes communities more resilient, yet political pressures consistently favour rapid reconstruction over thoughtful less hasty rebuilding that transforms communities into resilient ones. We know that early warning systems save lives, yet they remain under-resourced in the places that need them most.
These aren’t primarily technical problems—they’re systemic ones. The same competitive dynamics that create short-term thinking in corporate boardrooms operate in political systems, international negotiations, and even disaster response. The actor who takes time to build resilience may lose out to the actor who prioritises immediate returns.
Aside: Return on Investment for Disaster Risk Reduction
I actually sat down and produced a simple calculator to illustrate this point while waiting between conference sessions. The default values represent my country’s (NZ) GDP and annual disaster losses. You can see immediately the benefits to GDP growth of investing in disaster risk reduction, rather than merely recovery and rebuilding. If governments want to find extra percentage points of GDP growth this is how. You can even impute your own assumptions about the frequency and impact of large catastrophes and find the ideal GDP spend on disaster risk reduction under those assumptions (default model assumptions are at the bottom – note this is just a toy and greatly simplifies complex dynamics).
Small Island Developing States: A Microcosm of Global Challenges
Our charity Islands for the Future of Humanity focuses on the vulnerabilities and resilience options of remote island nations in the face of global catastrophe. The aim is to disseminate non-partisan information that helps ensure three goals:
That remote islands (including NZ and Australia) leverage their unique characteristics to protect the wellbeing of their populations (think successful Pacific Island border restrictions during Covid-19).
That islands generating surplus develop resilient structures and systems to ensure continued trade in critical goods and services, such as life-saving food during global catastrophe.
That remote islands develop global catastrophe resilience and mitigation mechanisms so that they might preserve complex integrated societies should major collapse impact the rest of the world.
In this context, I was interested in the UNDRR Global Platform’s session on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), which provided a particularly clear illustration of both the challenges and some potential solutions.
SIDS face disaster costs that can reach 64% of GDP for a single cyclone, an unsustainable burden that illustrates how existing systems fail to address truly systemic risks. There is no way that such impacts can be fully mitigated in cycles of disaster and perpetual recovery (note eg, my GDP impact calculator above), without the generative forces of polycrisis and metacrisis being addressed.
Cost of disasters in terms of GDP per annum (Figure credit: UNDRR 2025)
The Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS, introduced in 2024, attempts a more systemic approach. Rather than focusing only on disaster response, it aims to build resilient prosperity through enhanced financial access, climate action, and systematic monitoring frameworks. The emphasis on “trusting and using national systems”, rather than imposing external solutions, recognises that sustainable resilience must emerge from local capacity rather than outside intervention.
Yet even these SIDS initiatives operate within the global economic system that generates many of the risks they face. Small islands didn’t create climate change, but they bear disproportionate costs. They can build the most sophisticated early warning systems, but they can’t control global sea level rise or the hurricane patterns it affects.
This illustrates the fundamental challenge: effective disaster risk reduction increasingly requires addressing global systemic risks that no single actor can control.
The Path Forward: Thinking Beyond the Sendai Framework
As I reflected on the conference discussions, a troubling pattern emerged. Despite all the talk of coordination, collaboration, and systemic approaches, the fundamental drivers of accelerating risk remained largely unaddressed, even undiscussed.
This isn’t to dismiss the important work being done on specific disasters, early warning systems, or financing mechanisms. These efforts cost-effectively save lives and reduce suffering. But they operate within a larger system that continues generating risks faster than we can manage them.
One conference participant noted that, “the greatest risk we face today is failing to seize this chance to act boldly.”
I would argue that the greatest risk is failing to recognise the metacrisis drivers of the disaster risk that we face and continuing business and politics as usual while expecting different results.
As I noted above, one panellist at the 2025 UNDRR Global Platform was clear that by 2030, we’ll need something more dynamic and powerful than current frameworks to meet emerging challenges. This assessment is almost certainly correct, but it understates the magnitude of transformation required.
Given the widening mismatch between accelerating risks and our capacity to address their underlying drivers, the world is likely heading for what we might call a “hard landing.” Human systems will adapt, but with significant lag effects. This likely means a reduction in real GDP per capita globally and a drop in mean living standards across the coming decades, possibly accompanied by forced population decline from famine and other disasters as systems reorganise around new constraints.
This isn’t inevitable—there may be technological or social innovations that change the trajectory. But honest assessment suggests that our current approaches, however well-intentioned, are insufficient to address the scale and pace of change we’re experiencing.
The silver lining is that traumatic experiences can drive learning. The question is whether we can accelerate that learning process before the trauma becomes overwhelming.
Conclusion: Beyond Coordination to Transformation
The UNDRR 2025 Global Platform revealed both the commitment of participants and the limitations of current disaster risk reduction approaches. While the focus on coordination, breaking down silos, and scaling up financing addresses real needs, the conference revealed a critical blind spot: our failure to address the systemic forces generating risks faster than we can manage them.
Technical solutions can’t tackle the competitive dynamics, perverse incentives, and cognitive limitations that create what Schmachtenberger calls the metacrisis. Most participants genuinely want to build resilience, but they’re constrained by institutional and economic systems that make truly systemic solutions extremely difficult. It’s unclear whether any individual, organization, or state has sufficient agency to effect the needed changes.
Without frameworks for understanding these deeper patterns, disaster risk reduction remains reactive rather than transformative. We try to improve our responses to specific disasters while underlying dynamics continue accelerating overall risk.
This doesn’t mean abandoning current efforts, but embedding them within a larger understanding of systemic challenges. The real question isn’t whether we can coordinate better disaster responses, but whether we can transform the systems generating cascading disasters in the first place.
That transformation requires moving beyond technical fixes to address fundamental incentive structures, governance mechanisms, and cognitive frameworks shaping human systems. It’s more difficult than improving early warning systems or scaling financing, but may be the only approach that can actually reduce risk trajectories.
UNDRR Global Platform 2025 participants demonstrated remarkable dedication to resilience. The question is whether future conferences will grapple with the deeper systemic changes that such resilience requires.
Watch for Part II of this Tale of Two Conferences where I’ll present content from the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment symposium (Paris, June 7-9). This will feature a dash of hope to counter the above despair…
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