Researchers Ask How We Could Survive A Nuclear War, In Palmerston North
The team at Adapt Research, supporting independent charity Islands for the Future of Humanity, modelled how a city could feed its people after such a disaster, if global links to imports like fuel, food and also transport and telecommunications were disrupted.
Researchers used Palmerston North of Manawatū-Whanganui as a case study of a mid-sized, land-locked city of 91,000 people to model yields from agriculture with the food supply needed to feed the population.
Lead author, Dr Matt Boyd said they found 80 percent of the city's food supply needed could be met by growing food within a one kilometre radius of the city, and 20 percent of the supply could be topped up by urban agriculture.
"We established within Palmerston North, in this case, the amount of potential land where you might be able to grow food, like people's backyards and golf courses and parks and things, and what would be the optimal crops to grow that would produce the most protein and food energy per area of land, and therefore feed the most people," he said.
"What we found is that it's a surprisingly little amount of near urban land that would sort of top up to feed the city's population."
He said the Covid-19 pandemic inspired the need for the research, "because we all remember what happened to supply chains."
Freight and food security for global commodities like wheat were also threatened in the years that followed, when the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022.
Researchers modelled which crops would be most efficient to grow in an environment where imports were no longer possible, to maximise caloric and protein yields.
They found peas and potatoes would suit normal growing conditions, whereas sugar beet, spinach, wheat and carrots would be most efficient during a nuclear winter scenario.
Considering the country's reliance on imported fuel as our "Achille's heel," Boyd said agricultural machinery could still run, powered by biofuel that was produced by 9 percent of the entire city crop.
"During a global catastrophe that disrupts trade, fuel imports could cease, severely impacting the industrial food production and transportation systems that keep our supermarket shelves filled.
"To survive, New Zealanders will need to dramatically localise food production in and around our cities. This research explores how we might do that."
Boyd said modest investments into securing seed availability, integrated food security into the wider national security and building local food processing capacity could be the difference between survival and famine.
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