Australia could be one of the safest places on Earth if, or rather when, a global catastrophe strikes, according to new research that says the country’s isolation, self-sufficiency and political stability mean it can withstand most crises. That’s the top-down version. The finer print says no country escapes cleanly, and that resilience may depend as much on local communities as national borders.
Who Gets Left Holding the Bag
By some definitions, any event that puts 10 per cent of human lives under threat counts as a global catastrophic risk. The research breaks those risks into three buckets: abrupt sunlight reduction, catastrophic infrastructure loss, or global biological threats. Matt Boyd, who co-authored the research in the journal Global Challenges, said these aren’t just science fiction scenarios. “In fact, some of them have happened before, and some of them are guaranteed to happen,” he said. “Large magnitude volcanic eruptions have caused severe famines and even dynastic collapses, and they will happen again.”
“And while COVID didn't meet the definition of global catastrophic risk as we've been studying it, it overwhelmed the capacities of the world,” Boyd said. He is also the executive director of Islands for the Future of Humanity, a resilience charity based in New Zealand. His home country, along with Australia, ranked among the safest places in the world in many catastrophic scenarios. Both are isolated, democratic island nations with the potential to be largely self-sufficient in food production, energy, transport and communications.
That self-sufficiency is the whole game. When the systems built to keep people obediently supplied start failing, the people at the bottom feel it first.
When the Systems Snap
Dr Boyd said volcanic ash from a major eruption, or nuclear fallout blocking sunlight, could severely disrupt food supplies, while a catastrophic cyber attack could disable many of the systems cities depend upon to function. Global biological threats may also spread more rapidly through major urban centres, where large populations live and work in proximity. “There's such a large population density that requires a continuous supply of resources, water, food, electricity, and so forth,” he said. “If you start to lose one of those, because of the interconnected nature of all those systems, you start to lose all of them.”
That’s the machinery of modern control in one sentence: water, food, electricity, and the whole brittle arrangement that keeps cities running on schedule. The research says the arrangement can fail fast.
The COVID pandemic offered a glimpse of how people respond to perceived vulnerability in major cities, with many Australians relocating to regional areas. Kate Sollis was one of them, moving from Canberra to the Bega Valley on the far south coast of New South Wales. She described the region’s population of nearly 40,000 people spread across more than a dozen towns and villages as both diverse and deeply connected. “There's really something special about the Bega Valley that brings people in, and it makes them stay as well,” Ms Sollis said. “It's a place where you can easily tap into networks and rely on other people.”
“And what I hear anecdotally is the more socially cohesive a community is before a disaster, the easier it is to recover following a disaster,” she said. The region has faced repeated challenges in recent years. It was one of the areas hardest hit during the Black Summer bushfires before recovery efforts were disrupted by the COVID pandemic. Like communities across Australia, it has also faced ongoing cost-of-living pressures.
What People Built Below
Tim Whitaker and Kate Sollis said they were conscious of the competing claims that Australia could be one of the safest places in the world while still facing significant risks of its own. “I don't think you can put all Australia in one basket when you're looking at resilience,” Mr Whitaker said. “You've got to have that community nuance about exactly how things are going to affect them.”
“You've got to have that granular data,” he said. Mr Whitaker is the co-founder of the Bega Valley Data Collective, which formed after the Black Summer bushfires. Ms Sollis recently became its chief executive, and their work focuses on in-depth surveys on community wellbeing and providing local data to help guide decisions affecting the region.
That’s the local answer to distant decision-making: people gathering their own information, measuring their own needs, and trying to make sense of what the official machinery misses or flattens.
“There's a massive movement around Australia and across the world with this kind of thinking,” Ms Sollis said. “It comes in a number of different names: the wellbeing economy, doughnut economics, Regen Melbourne, and Regen Sydney. But all with wellbeing of people and planet front and centre when developing policy and programs.”
Despite living through the 2019-20 bushfires, Mr Whitaker was unsure whether the community was significantly better prepared for future disasters. “I hope we've learnt some lessons,” he said. “People easily forget what happened until it happens again. How we bounce back after that, I really don't know.”
When asked what gives him hope in the face of a potential global catastrophe, Dr Boyd pointed to both institutions and ordinary people willing to plan for the future. “Plans are cheap, and we've previously suggested things like a parliamentary commissioner for catastrophic risk,” he said. “But even things like local deliberative democracy, citizens' assemblies in local regions or towns, can come up with a plan if something should happen.”
“Resilience occurs at every level,” he said. For Dr Boyd, preparing for catastrophic risk is ultimately about balancing efficiency with resilience. “To what degree do we want to focus on protecting profit?” he said. “Instead of focusing just on the efficiency of things, we could start to focus a bit more on the resilience and redundancy of systems to protect us longer term and to protect future generations.”
That question hangs over the whole report. Profit gets its own protection plan. Ordinary people get told to be resilient.
The central conclusion of the research is captured in its title: No Place To Hide. Australia may be better placed than many nations to endure a global catastrophe, but no country would be spared from its impacts. How well communities, governments and nations prepare may ultimately determine how resilient they prove to be in an uncertain future.