We work at the intersection of global catastrophic risks (GCRs) and food security. GCRs threaten the lives of a large percentage of people around the world. We want to ensure that if such an event occurs, the number of deaths doesn’t then increase because traditional food supplies were destroyed in the disaster.
We seek to increase communication and collaboration between the GCR community and more conventional food security researchers and practitioners, as there is a lot we can learn from each other. Building resilience to global food shocks is inherently interdisciplinary.
We define a catastrophe as an event that could deplete 5% or more of global calorie output, or access to those calories. This 5% threshold is somewhat arbitrary, but what it spotlights is “a disaster at a scale the world is not prepared for,” a scenario in which the World Food Programme (WFP) and others would struggle to deliver food to all the continents that would need it.
We focus first on catastrophes that could realistically occur this century and we consider scenarios that could have a dramatic and negative effect on our food supply. Such scenarios include extreme weather events, nuclear winter, large volcanic eruptions, high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMP), crop pandemics, cyberattacks, bioterrorism, and more. Learn about all of the catastrophes we focus on here.
This is actually a complicated question, so let’s break it down.
Will a multi-continent catastrophe occur at some point in the future? Almost certainly.
Will a global catastrophe occur in the next 5-10 years? 20-30 years? And which regions around the world are most likely to be impacted? Those aren’t questions we can answer for certain. However, we can say this: while a global catastrophe is not very likely in any one year, it’s very likely between now and the next 60-100 years. So the odds of a global catastrophe is high enough for concern during your lifetime, and the likelihood of a catastrophe is even greater during the lifetime of your children and grandchildren.
In fact, some very smart people have predicted a high likelihood that a catastrophic event will occur during this century. For example, Martin Hellman, one of our Board members, famously predicted that there was a 1% likelihood of nuclear war each year. While the odds of a nuclear war happening in any given year are low, the odds that it will happen within this century are much higher.
But nuclear war is just one example. There are numerous types of catastrophic risks, and while each might have a low probability on its own when considered all together, the odds of a global catastrophe increase.
Moreover, a catastrophic risk is often defined as an event that kills at least 10% of the global population, but ALLFED focuses on risks that could 5% or more of global calorie output, or access to those calories. Events that put food at risk like that are far more common, especially since it would only take a couple of smaller events occurring over a short period of time -- such as multiple extreme weather events -- to trigger a famine on such scales. For example, the combination of the COVID pandemic and massive locust swarms in Africa and Southern Asia dramatically increased global food insecurity in 2020 and 2021.
If 2020 taught us anything, it should be that global catastrophes will happen, and we need to be prepared.
Some scientists theorize that the eruption of the Toba supervolcano, approximately 74,000 years ago in present-day Indonesia, reduced the world’s human population to as few as 2,000–3,000 adults.
Since then, other catastrophes have harmed humanity at scales that ALLFED looks at. Moreover, researchers from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge and the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford fear that the odds of a global catastrophe are growing, especially as we develop increasingly powerful technologies.
Unfortunately, the probability of a catastrophe is too high. However, even if a large catastrophe doesn’t occur, with an increasing global population and the threat of climate change, we expect food insecurity to be a growing concern. We hope some of the work we’re doing will be able to help ensure people have access to the nutrients they need, if their regions experience extended droughts, severe flooding, massive locust swarms, or other anticipated threats to conventional food supplies.
Economics and politics, not lack of food, drive most malnutrition and starvation today. However, during a catastrophe in which food production was significantly reduced, we could experience global famines as a result of insufficient food production. Unrest as a result of food insecurity could lead to conflict and further threats to humanity.
Our goal, “feeding everyone no matter what,” is to ensure that we can find ways to produce enough food for everyone can eat regardless of the type or duration of the catastrophe. We hope that the existence of resilient food solutions will help increase cooperation between nations as they try to feed their citizens.
By helping to prevent catastrophic and cascading scenarios from getting worse, we can help prevent widespread suffering, loss of important social functions, and threats to civilization itself. We have developed a number of innovative, resilient food solutions that can be produced with little or no sunlight. Learn more about our suggested solutions here.
There are a number of immediate problems that must be addressed, and we agree they should be worked on. But many of the biggest issues the world faces today could also lead to massive famines if we aren’t able to control or prevent them:
- New global risks associated with climate change are identified on a regular basis.
- As long as nuclear weapons exist, nuclear war is a possibility.
- Cyberattacks could disrupt food supplies and distribution.
- Other emerging technologies could disrupt access to food in other ways.
- Multiple risks could be realized simultaneously, or cascade as a result of each other.
And those are in addition to the natural risks, such as supervolcanic eruptions, which have existed for longer than humanity. Our research indicates that for relatively minimal cost and effort, governments can put meaningful plans in place to feed people if a global catastrophe occurs.
We need both. Better food supply chains will help ensure food gets to people who need it now and in a catastrophe. But if we have a significant food shortage, supply chains alone won’t be enough. We need resilient food solutions as well, in order to feed everyone.
No! Our solutions are for everyone—for all countries, for all governments, for all communities. That’s another reason we focus on cost-effective solutions. If something happens to our food supply, we need resilient food solutions that are also equitable—we want the most people to survive.
We tend to focus on larger-scale solutions, for three reasons:
- Governments can establish back-up plans to scale up resilient food processes quickly, to help more people in need.
- Larger-scale solutions are typically cheaper.
- Not everyone can produce the resources they need, and we need to be able to export food to those regions.
That said, many resilient foods can be produced or grown at a smaller scale, and if communities are able to take care of themselves, that will increase the likelihood that most residents will survive. In some catastrophes, we may also lose transportation, leaving communities no choice but to rely on local resources. So we encourage individuals and communities to consider how our resilient food solutions can be implemented in their communities.
Yes! And we can very likely get food from other sources as well. Learn more about the various resilient food solutions we think are most promising here.
The catastrophes we worry about most would impact food supplies for years, not just for a few days or months. It would cost tens of trillions of dollars to store up enough food to feed everyone on Earth for five years. Moreover, with so much of our food supply going into storage, the current prices of food would increase. Storing some food and strategic resources for emergencies is always a good idea, as long as we recognize that global catastrophes often involve timeframes of years and require preparation and resources outside of food stocks.
This is a concern of ours, especially if distribution pipes for cities and towns freeze, or if we lose infrastructure functions. We hope to do more research to address how we can ensure people have access to sufficient water, but for now, the loss of food during a global food shock is where our expertise lies and, therefore, our highest priority.
In starvation situations, humans will hunt animals, so preventing desperation will in itself help to protect biodiversity for some species.
We are very conscious of current concerns about the imbalance in domestic versus wild biomass, and about threats to biodiversity. We wouldn’t want any part of our work to cause further harm. In fact, we believe that our resilient food solutions could be used in a catastrophe to help sustain sample populations or microhabitats. These could then be used to help with recovery, repopulation, and natural succession.
Find out more on our policy page.
Some of our solutions rely on repurposing various industrial factories and plants to produce resilient foods. There are many industries that could be involved in this repurposing effort, including paper mills, breweries, biomass plants, animal feed factories, alternative protein manufacturing, and others. Learn more here.
We’re funded by generous donations, mostly from individuals and philanthropists, who recognize the importance of building resilience to global food shocks, and who believe in ALLFED’s work contributing to this goal. We have received funding from NASA, Jaan Tallinn, and the Centre for Effective Altruism.
The COVID-19 pandemic heightened food insecurity for millions but did not reach the anticipated 5% global caloric output loss that experts predict is probable this century.
ALLFED reoriented our work to focus on food system insecurity, potential famine, and cascading threats exacerbated by the pandemic. We were concerned with the hundreds of millions of people, predominantly in African and Asian countries, facing new or exacerbated food insecurity. Our efforts included providing briefings to the Tanzanian and Ethiopian governments on mitigation strategies for compounding crises like locust swarms, floods, and droughts.
Two of our major COVID-19 projects analyzed how the pandemic could increase the risk of food system shocks and were the result of collaborations with various stakeholders.
The first project was the Cascading Risks from COVID-19 to Food Systems report, which provided early analysis of multiple threats potentially exacerbated by poor responses to the pandemic. On Earth Day, we co-authored an Atlantic Council article that published the report’s findings and was ultimately presented to members of the World Food Programme, multinational bodies, and the governments of countries with some of the most at-risk populations. The report led to collaborations with the World Bank’s Famine Action Mechanism and with Newspeak House.
Another major initiative was the provision of an open-source resource with over 400 materials aimed at helping researchers and policymakers address food system disasters, focusing on famine risks in vulnerable regions due to COVID-19, locust swarms, and other factors. It was created with a global team of experts and volunteers to address food insecurity risks heightened by COVID-19. The project is no longer active, but various individuals and companies engaged with it during the pandemic, including dozens of NGOs (Mercy Corps and OXFAM), government groups (DEFRA and USAID), the private sector (Bayer and Calysta), and multilateral organizations (including the WFP and the FAO). This also led to a co-authored Atlantic Council article.
ALLFED also focused on improving resilience and catastrophe response. We developed a formal global response plan and provided team training for it, incorporating guidelines for different disaster scenarios. Additionally, we leveraged our industrial research background to assist with ventilator alternatives in partnership with the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Lab (MOST), which published several pandemic-related resources.
Part of our mission is to develop an alliance of people and organizations interested in this work. Please contact us and tell us about yourself or your organization and how we could work together. We’d love to hear from you.
Don’t panic.
Seriously, that really is our #1 tip!
Solutions exist, and as long as people, communities, and governments work together, we can implement them. Perhaps the biggest threat we face is a catastrophe after which people, communities, and governments don’t work together, and instead, in a panic, they hoard food supplies or go to war with each other. We want to prevent that scenario.