Australia has been named the country best positioned to survive a global catastrophe such as nuclear war or a pandemic. Its geographic isolation as an island, its capacity to feed itself and its industrial base were cited as strengths.
Australia Withstands All Three Categories of Catastrophe
According to the science outlet ScienceAlert on the 26th, a research team led by Florian Ulrich Jehn, an environmental scientist at the University of Hagen in Germany, published the findings in the international journal Global Challenges.
The team reviewed more than 200 studies and reports on global catastrophic risks, or GCR, covering nuclear war, asteroid impacts, large-scale volcanic eruptions, cyberattacks and infectious disease.
The researchers grouped global catastrophic risks into three broad categories: events that abruptly block sunlight, such as volcanic eruptions, nuclear winter and asteroid impacts; events that halt power, transport and food production, such as geomagnetic storms and cyberattacks; and events that combine tens of millions to hundreds of millions of deaths with the collapse of health care and famine.
The conditions for withstanding all three risks included established democracy, economic strength, low social inequality, a solid industrial base and government capacity, geographic isolation, decentralization and industrial diversity, and low dependence on trade.
Australia was identified as meeting most of those conditions. "It has the obvious problem of climate change, but it did well," Jehn said, explaining that as an island it can easily shut itself off and isolate, produces enormous quantities of food and has large domestic industrial and mining sectors.
Not a Complete Safe Haven
There are weaknesses as well. The country's reliance on imports for much of its fuel, medicine and fertilizer could work against it in a crisis, according to the analysis.
The conditions that build resilience can also work against one another. A location far from other regions is an advantage in blocking the spread of infectious disease, but recovery takes longer if infrastructure such as the power grid or logistics breaks down.
A thick industrial base is likewise a double-edged sword: it expands the capacity to source supplies domestically in a crisis, but it also increases the number of targets for cyberattacks.
New Zealand, Japan, Switzerland and Argentina followed Australia in the ranking. Those countries have gaps of their own. All but Switzerland have long coastlines and would struggle to escape a tsunami if an asteroid struck the ocean, and all five, Switzerland included, depend heavily on trade and would find it hard to stay outside the blast radius of a major volcanic eruption in Southeast Asia or South America, the team concluded.
The researchers stressed that resilience is not fate but the result of policy choices. "Identifying countries with strong structural resilience, such as Australia and New Zealand, can serve as a reference point for building a global disaster response system in the future," they wrote.
They added that those countries "would be able to operate food reserves and seed banks and maintain industrial capacity even in the midst of a catastrophe, allowing them to serve as headquarters leading the international response."
