Ideas Blog

Beyond Local Hazards: Why New Zealand’s Resilience Thinking Must Expand to Global Catastrophic Risk

New Zealand has a geographic advantage that could be a strategic liability. Our isolation protects us from many regional and global threats, but makes us uniquely vulnerable to the one consequence nearly all global catastrophes share: the collapse of international trade and supply chains.

This paradox sits at the heart of our new paper in peer-reviewed journal Policy Quarterly, which examines how New Zealand’s current approach to long-term resilience, while commendable in many ways, exemplifies broader blind spots that could leave this island country dangerously unprepared for 21st century risks. In this post we summarise the key points and recommendations from our research.

Photo by Micaela Parente on Unsplash

TLDR/Summary

  • The DPMC’s 2025 draft long-term insights briefing on hazard resilience represents a welcome shift toward anticipatory governance and long-term thinking
  • However, current publicly facing frameworks tend to focus on familiar local natural hazards while systematically excluding global catastrophic risks like nuclear war, bioengineered pandemics, extreme volcanic eruptions, severe solar storms, and catastrophic AI failures
  • For an island nation dependent on global trade, supply chain collapse represents our primary threat vector regardless of what triggers it
  • Understanding global systemic risk and “polycrisis”, manifested through at least 14 global systemic stresses that interact to create cascading failures, is essential for effective resilience planning
  • Moving forward requires transparent public engagement with comprehensive risk information, not technocratic approaches that limit disclosure for fear of “scaring the public”
  • NZ needs publicly facing risk assessment work that facilitates informed democratic dialogue about resilience options and their costs – enabling citizens to make collective choices about investing in our shared future

Strengths and limitations of current thinking

We previously noted that discussion documents like the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s draft Long-Term Insights Briefing deserve credit for several important advances. Such work explicitly connects resilience with long-term prosperity, rejecting the false economy of austerity followed by repeated disaster-rebuild cycles. It acknowledges that hazards may have catastrophic consequences and that abrupt crises can occur. And crucially, it represents a fundamental shift from reactive emergency response toward proactive resilience-building.

These are genuine achievements that move New Zealand’s risk discourse in the right direction.

But the briefing, and much public sector risk thinking, remains trapped within frameworks addressing symptoms rather than systemic forces, focusing primarily on familiar natural hazards and incremental climate risks while missing an entire category of global catastrophic risks that could trigger the isolation and supply chain collapse we’re most vulnerable to.

Consider what’s systematically excluded from many current resilience frameworks:

  • Nuclear war and electromagnetic pulse attacks causing global agricultural failures and cascading infrastructure collapse
  • Bioengineered pandemics potentially far more severe than Covid-19
  • Large volcanic eruptions comparable to Tambora 1815, particularly those affecting critical global supply chain pinch points or altering the climate
  • Severe solar storms capable of disabling electrical grids for weeks or months across regions of the world
  • Catastrophic AI failures in interconnected infrastructure
  • Global food system failures from synchronous breadbasket failures severely impacting food supply and trade relations

These risks share critical characteristics that distinguish them from conventional hazards: they typically originate elsewhere yet spread via cascading impacts to cause global catastrophe; external assistance may be unavailable when needed most; and they could threaten global critical infrastructure destruction rather than mere disruption.

While individually unlikely in any given year, collectively these risks represent high-probability problems over decades, with some, like severe solar storms and large volcanic eruptions, being practically inevitable.

Understanding the polycrisis

Beyond discrete catastrophic events lies an even more fundamental challenge: the world faces rising systemic risk driven by interconnected global stresses.

Working with frameworks developed by institutions like the Cascade Institute, we identify at least 14 major chronic systemic stresses simultaneously pushing human systems toward dangerous disequilibrium. These range from great-power hegemonic transition and climate heating to ideological fragmentation, concentrated industrial food production, and the propagation of artificial intelligence.

These stresses interact through what researchers term the “stress-trigger-crisis” model. Any major trigger event – whether a volcanic eruption blanketing Southeast Asian ports with ash, catastrophic electricity loss disabling GPS and shipping, or nuclear conflict over Taiwan – could tip already-stressed global systems into cascading failure.

Our new peer reviewed paper illustrates how each of these global stresses creates specific vulnerabilities for New Zealand, from liquid fuel import disruption to digital payment system collapse to synchronous failure of global breadbaskets.

For New Zealand, this creates a stark reality: while our geography, natural resources and social systems position us relatively well to weather various global storms (think Covid-19), our greatest vulnerability lies precisely in trade and supply chain collapse – the downstream consequence of virtually all global catastrophic risk.

Breakdown in the supply of goods and services is both the cause and consequence of virtually all past civilisation collapse.

Need for improved risk and resilience tools

New Zealand’s approach to national risk assessment lacks analytical outputs that have become standard practice among comparable nations grappling with complex risk landscapes.

The United Kingdom maintains a detailed, publicly accessible National Risk Register, alongside comprehensive chronic risks analysis, substantial parliamentary inquiry reports, and a National Resilience Action Plan. The United States has commissioned RAND Corporation assessments of global catastrophic risks, enacted the Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act 2022, and established dedicated institutional frameworks for extreme risks.

Even when such comprehensive approaches exist, significant methodological problems persist. But at minimum, these nations have recognised that transparent, systematic assessment of the full spectrum of risks – including low-probability, high-impact events – represents a fundamental democratic necessity.

New Zealand’s current approach (both nationally and regionally) not only lacks this scope and transparency, but also exhibits the methodological shortcomings we identified in previous research including: insufficient justification of foundational assumptions, systematic omission of largest-scale risks, and limited stakeholder engagement to legitimise key choices.

The democratic imperative for transparency

This brings us to one of the most critical gaps: the absence of transparent, detailed, publicly-facing risk assessment that enables and can be used to stimulate informed democratic dialogue.

The 2021 UK House of Lords’ report on extreme risks included a presumption toward publication of security information, stating that “only through transparency and a healthy culture of challenge can we provide society with a reliable foundation to respond to emerging risks.”

The institutional aversion to “scaring the public” must be overcome. Citizens require access to comprehensive risk information spanning the full spectrum from conventional hazards to global catastrophic and systemic threats, supported by government-facilitated forums enabling structured public deliberation.

But more importantly, information sharing needs to be solutions-focused, including transparent information about resilience investment options, their costs, benefits and trade-offs across different time frames and scenarios.

This approach empowers rather than alarms populations. It enables discourse over the “tough decisions” the draft briefing acknowledges while ensuring democratic legitimacy for long-term resilience investments. And it recognizes that New Zealanders are adults capable of engaging with difficult realities and making informed choices about their collective future.

New Zealand’s strategic position

Here’s the opportunity: New Zealand possesses substantial advantages that current frameworks underutilise.

Our geographic isolation, low urban density, plentiful food production capacity, abundant renewable energy potential, relatively strong democratic institutions, and established social capital position us uniquely well – if properly leveraged through anticipatory planning.

Regional cooperation with Australia and Pacific neighbours offers additional strategic opportunities. Initiatives like shared vaccine manufacturing capacity, cooperation on shipping resilience, and coordinated resilience planning could strengthen collective preparedness for global catastrophic risks that are inherently cross-border in nature.

Research shows that egalitarian institutions and transparent governance structures demonstrate superior adaptive capacity compared with hierarchical alternatives. This suggests that democratic deepening through citizens’ assemblies and deliberative forums represents both a values commitment and a pragmatic resilience strategy.

Pathways forward

Our new paper outlines several concrete recommendations:

Expand hazard coverage to include global catastrophic risks that traditional frameworks systematically exclude. International precedents demonstrate this is slowly becoming standard practice among comparable nations.

Adopt systemic analytical frameworks that recognise interdependencies, cascade pathways, and stress-trigger-crisis dynamics rather than treating hazards as discrete events.

Strengthen resilience factors such as geographical advantages, institutions, and social capital through deliberate cultivation rather than focusing exclusively on risk drivers.

Implement institutional reforms including dedicated risk officers or a parliamentary commissioner for catastrophic risks, cross-sector collaboration mandates, and three-lines-of-defence approaches.

Ensure basic needs continuity through both strengthened existing systems and alternative “Plan B” infrastructure capable of functioning at a minimum when primary systems fail.

Finance using intergenerationally fair methods through approaches that avoid disadvantaging current populations while preventing unfair burden-shifting to future generations.

Our recent research found majority public support (56-63%) across the political spectrum for institutional reforms to manage global catastrophic risk. New Zealanders are ready for this conversation.

Conclusion: An opportunity for leadership

Our critique extends far beyond the DPMC briefing toward establishing principles applicable across all public sector risk and resilience thinking.

By embedding systemic thinking, expanding considered hazards, ensuring transparency, and implementing institutional reforms oriented toward anticipatory governance, New Zealand can establish itself as a global leader in building resilience to 21st-century challenges through genuine democratic engagement.

The alternative of continuing reactive approaches that address symptoms while global stresses accumulate will ensure that risks will continue emerging faster than interventions can manage them.

The result of getting this right would benefit not just New Zealanders, but populations depending on our food exports and humanity generally, should catastrophe ever threaten global collapse. Our isolation could become our greatest strategic asset but only if we invest in resilience with eyes wide open to the full spectrum of threats we face.

The choice is ours: genuine anticipatory governance through transparent democratic engagement, or reactive crisis management that addresses symptoms while root causes remain unchanged.

***

Read the full paper: Boyd, M. and Wilson, N. (2025) “From Disaster Response to Anticipatory Governance: why Aotearoa New Zealand’s long-term resilience thinking must address global catastrophic risk and systemic vulnerabilities,” Policy Quarterly, 21(4), pp.61-71.

Read our original submission: Response to DPMC Draft Long-term Insights Briefing (PDF, 12 pages)

Consider donating

If you support our work providing non-partisan evidence-based information to support resilience to global catastrophic risks, please 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.

NZ faces medicines shortage if global trade cut off

Photo by Christine Sandu on Unsplash

The following is a media release by the University of Otago about our latest research paper, which determined that New Zealand would likely struggle to supply most of the commonly prescribed medicines used in acute care if a global catastrophe seriously reduced global trade.

New Zealanders could lose access to life-saving medicines in a trade-ending global catastrophe because imported ingredients are needed to locally manufacture commonly used medicines, research led by the University of Otago, Wellington shows.

The researchers say events such as a Northern Hemisphere nuclear war, a volcanic winter, a bioengineered pandemic, or a major solar storm, could all contribute to a collapse in international trade which would lead to critical shortages of imported medicines.

The research is published in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

The senior researcher, Professor Nick Wilson, from the Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Public Health at the University of Otago, Wellington, says the research shows none of the most widely prescribed 10 medicines for acute conditions, including pain relievers and medicines for treating infections, are able to be made in New Zealand. This is because of a lack of access to the key ingredients, many of which require petrochemical refining which the country no longer has.

Professor Wilson says global manufacturing of medicines has become dependent on just a few countries, with Europe, for example, obtaining 60-80 per cent of its ingredients for generic medicine manufacture from China.

The medicines examined in the study are: the popular pain reliever paracetamol; omeprazole used for acute gastritis and treating gastric ulcers; the antibiotic amoxicillin, used to treat severe bacterial pneumonia; the anti-inflammatory ibuprofen, used for acute pain relief; aspirin, used to manage strokes and heart attacks; the blood pressure medication metoprolol; salbutamol, used for acute asthma attacks; prednisone, a steroid used for severe allergic reactions; the antihistamine cetirizine; and the calcium channel blocker amlodipine, used to manage angina.

Professor Wilson says not only is modern pharmaceutical manufacturing highly dependent on ingredients from petrochemical refining, but New Zealand lacks many other necessary ingredients for the 10 medicines – and the complex industrial infrastructure to synthesise modern medicines at scale.

“The country’s current pharmaceutical industry is focused on secondary manufacturing and formulation, the packaging of imported active ingredients and quality control and testing.

“So once stocks of imported medicines had been exhausted in a post-catastrophe situation, there would likely be increased deaths from infections, heart disease, stroke and asthma.

“New Zealand could potentially build new infrastructure to produce some of the ingredients needed for medicines production by modifying the wood pyrolysis plant in Timaru to produce phenols and furans, or the Glenbrook steel plant to produce benzene/phenol from coke gas. A micro-refinery could also be built for oil extracted in Taranaki or from coal tar from West Coast coal mines.

“But all of these options would be expensive and challenging to undertake in a crisis situation.”

Another of the study authors, independent researcher Dr Matt Boyd, says New Zealand could also consider producing natural alternatives to some medicines, for instance by using salicylic acid from the bark of willow trees as an alternative to aspirin, growing opium poppies to make morphine and codeine, or by using hormones derived from livestock to produce insulin.

But he says, one of the most sensible approaches would be for the New Zealand and Australian Governments to come up with a joint plan to produce and trade key pharmaceuticals.

“Australia still has petrochemical refining, produces some of its own medicines, and is a major global producer of legal morphine from opium poppies. The New Zealand Government could contribute funding towards medicines production in Australia, but it could also help ensure the viability of post-catastrophe Trans-Tasman trade by using locally produced biofuel to keep cargo ships running.”

The research paper, ‘Capacity to manufacture key pharmaceuticals in Aotearoa New Zealand after a global catastrophe’ is authored by Professor Nick Wilson, Peter Wood and Dr Matt Boyd and is published in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

The great divide: How different Covid-19 control strategies shaped pandemic outcomes

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.

Economic impact findings challenge conventional wisdom

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 countries found 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

  1. 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]
  2. RAND. Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment. Homeland Security Operational Analysis Center; 2024
  3. 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
  4. 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
  5. Summers JA, Kerr J, Grout L, et al. A proactive Covid-19 response associated with better health and economic outcomes for OECD High-Income Island Countries. SSM – Population Health 2025;31:101827. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352827325000813
  6. 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
  7. Baker M, Broadbent A, Kvalsvig A, Wilson N. Improving our pandemic preparedness: Counterfactuals and continuous quality improvement. Public Health Expert Briefing. 2025 Apr 16. https://www.phcc.org.nz/briefing/improving-our-pandemic-preparedness-counterfactuals-and-continuous-quality-improvement
  8. 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

Majority public support for government action on catastrophic risks

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:

  1. Develop a national strategy for global catastrophic risks – building on the National Risk Framework but extending it to worst-case scenarios.8
  2. Establish a dedicated agency or commission, either domestic or in partnership with Australia12, to monitor, assess, and coordinate responses to these risks.
  3. Invest in resilience measures that reduce vulnerabilities exposed in recent studies, such as energy security for ensuring food production.9, 13
  4. Engage the public through deliberative processes to deepen understanding of trade-offs and maintain legitimacy.
  5. 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.

References

  1. Mecklin J. (2025). Closer than ever: It is now 89 seconds to midnight – 2025 Doomsday Clock Statement. Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/2025-statement/
  2. World Economic Forum. (2025). The Global Risks Report 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/global-risks-report-2025/
  3. 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
  4. Preddey G, Wilkins P, Wilson N, Kjellstrom T, & Williamson B. (1982). Nuclear Disaster: A Report to the Commission for the Future. https://www.mcguinnessinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CFTF-March-1982-Future-Contingencies-4-Nuclear-Disaster-FULL.pdf
  5. Green W, Cairns T, & Wright J. (1987). New Zealand After Nuclear War. New Zealand Planning Council.
  6. 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) [Report]. Reefton: Adapt Research Ltd. https://adaptresearchwriting.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/231117-v1-nzcat-resilience-nuclear-gcrs-1.pdf
  7. Boyd M, & Wilson N. (2021). Anticipatory Governance for Preventing and Mitigating Catastrophic and Existential Risks. Policy Quarterly, 17(4), 20-31.
  8. Gluckman P, & Bardsley A. (2021). Uncertain but inevitable: The expert-policy-political nexus and high-impact risks. https://informedfutures.org/high-impact-risks/
  9. 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.
  10. Ipsos. (2024). National risks public survey: All threats and hazards (Commissioned by the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet). https://www.dpmc.govt.nz/our-programmes/risk-and-resilience/national-risk-framework/2024-national-risks-public-survey-report
  11. Wiener JB. (2016). The Tragedy of the Uncommons: On the Politics of Apocalypse. Global Policy, 7(S1), 67-80. https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12319
  12. Wilson N, Boyd M, Potter J, Mansoor O, Kvalsvig A, & Baker M. (2024). The case for a NZ-Australia Pandemic Cooperation Agreement. Public Health Expert Briefing. https://www.phcc.org.nz/briefing/case-nz-australia-pandemic-cooperation-agreement.
  13. 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.
  14. Johns Hopkins University. (2019). Risk Communication Strategies for the Very Worst of Cases. https://centerforhealthsecurity.org/sites/default/files/2022-12/190304-risk-comm-strategies.pdf
  15. 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
  16. Wilson N, Kerr J, & Boyd M. (2025). New government document on hazards: Good progress but gaps remain. Public Health Expert Briefing. https://www.phcc.org.nz/briefing/new-government-document-hazards-good-progress-gaps-remain 

Food Security and Global Catastrophic Risk – presentation to Environment Canterbury 10 Sept 2025

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.

Examples include:

With such events, outside help may be unavailable. Critical systems could face destruction, not just disruption, preventing rapid recovery.

While unlikely in any given year, some of these risks are uncertain but inevitable.

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:

For full details see the NZCat Main Report

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.

Watch the webinar here

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

  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. 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.
  4. 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
  5. 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
  6. 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
  7. 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

A Vision for National Resilience: Our submission on DPMC’s Long-term Insights Briefing

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.

Building Real Resilience: Our Submissions on NZ’s Fuel and Infrastructure Plans

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.

You can read our submissions

Read our submission on the Fuel Security Plan
Read our submission on the Infrastructure Plan

Do you agree with us?

Have your own say – submissions to both consultations are still open:

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.

Health-impaired world leaders raise nuclear war fears

[Media Release by University of Otago]

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.”

Notes to editors:

The research paper, ‘The Frequently Impaired Health of Leaders of Nuclear Weapon States: An Analysis of 51 Deceased Leaders’ is published in BMC Research Notes and is fully available online: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13104-025-07351-8
The associated recent study of impaired New Zealand Prime Ministers is detailed in this University of Otago media release: https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/newsroom/nz-needs-options-to-remove-ill-or-infirm-leaders,-researchers-say

For more information, contact:

Professor Nick Wilson
Department of Public Health
University of Otago, Wellington – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Pōneke

Email: nick.wilson@otago.ac.nz

Mobile: + 64 21 204 5523

Cheryl Norrie
Communications Adviser

University of Otago, Wellington – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka, Pōneke

Email: cheryl.norrie@otago.ac.nz
Mob: + 64 21 249 6787

New US NAS Report: How Nuclear War Would Cascade Through Society and Economy

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:

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.

Think Beyond Climate: What New Zealand Can Learn from the European Urban Resilience Forum 2025

As the storm clouds of global systemic and catastrophic risk appear, Rotterdam is wrestling with innovation in urban resilience. Photo: the author

TLDR/Summary

  • 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.

The Collaboration Imperative

The European Urban Resilience Forum June 25-27, Rotterdam. Photo: the author

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.

Figure credit: Arnscheidt et al. (2025)

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.

Our own report Aotearoa NZ, Global Catastrophe, and Resilience Options lays out one possible vision of extreme risk governance and relevant investment options.

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.