New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Australia’s Tasmania and Ireland are the places best suited to survive a global collapse of society, a study found.
The researchers said that civilization was “in a perilous state” due to the interconnectedness of global society, and the resulting global energy demand and environmental damage.
A collapse could arise from shocks such as a severe financial crisis, effects of the climate crisis, destruction of nature, an even worse pandemic than COVID-19 or a combination of these factors, they said.
To assess which nations would be most resilient to such a collapse, countries were ranked according to their ability to grow food for their population, protect their borders from unwanted mass migration, and maintain an electrical grid and some manufacturing ability.
Islands in temperate regions and mostly with low population densities came out on top.
The researchers said that their study highlighted the factors that nations must improve to increase resilience.
A globalized society that prizes economic efficiency can damage resilience, they said, adding that spare capacity is needed in food and other vital sectors.
Billionaires have been reported to be buying land for bunkers in New Zealand in preparation for an apocalypse.
“We weren’t surprised New Zealand was on our list,” said Aled Jones, a professor in Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute. “We chose that you had to be able to protect borders, and places had to be temperate.”
“It’s quite obvious that large islands with complex societies on them already” make up the list, he said.
“We were quite surprised the UK came out strongly. It is densely populated, has traditionally outsourced manufacturing, hasn’t been the quickest to develop renewable technology and only produces 50 percent of its own food at the moment, but it has the potential to withstand shocks,” he added.
The study, which has been published in the journal Sustainability, said: “The globe-spanning, energy-intensive industrial civilization that characterizes the modern era represents an anomalous situation when it is considered against the majority of human history.”
Referring to environmental destruction, limited resources and population growth, the study said that academic “literature paints a picture of human civilization that is in a perilous state, with large and growing risks developing in multiple spheres of the human endeavor.”
Places that did not suffer “the most egregious effects of societal collapses and are therefore able to maintain significant populations” have been described as “collapse lifeboats,” the study said.
New Zealand was found to have the greatest potential to survive relatively unscathed due to geothermal and hydroelectric energy sources, abundant agricultural land and low human population density.
Jones said that major global food losses, a financial crisis and a pandemic had all happened in the past few years, and “we’ve been lucky that things haven’t all happened at the same time — there’s no real reason why they can’t all happen in the same year”.
“As you start to see these events happening, I get more worried, but I also hope we can learn more quickly than we have in the past that resilience is important,” he said.
COVID-19 had shown that governments could act quickly when needed, he said.
“It’s interesting how quickly we can close borders, and how quickly governments can make decisions to change things,” he said, but added that the pursuit of “ever-more efficient economies isn’t the thing you want to do for resilience.”
“We need to build in some slack in the system, so that if there is a shock then you have the ability to respond because you’ve got spare capacity,” he said. “We need to start thinking about resilience much more in global planning, but obviously, the ideal thing is that a quick collapse doesn’t happen.”
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