Feeding Everyone No Matter What
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Type Paper
Cite as Citation reference for the source document. Deborah Cole, Mohamed Abdelkhaliq, Michael Griswold, David Denkenberger, Joshua M. Pearce. Feeding Everyone if Industry is Disabled. International Disaster and Risk Conferences (IDRC) Conference Proceedings 2016, Davos, Switzerland. pp. 141-146 (2016). open access

A number of risks could cause widespread electrical failure and temporary global electronics loss, including a series of high-altitude electromagnetic pulses (HEMPs) caused by nuclear weapons, an extreme solar storm, and a coordinated cyber attack. Since modern industry depends on electricity and electronics, it is likely there would be a collapse of the functioning of industry and machines in these scenarios. As our current high agricultural productivity depends on industry (e.g. for fertilizers) it is generally assumed that there would be mass starvation in these scenarios. We model the loss in current agricultural output due to losing industry. Then we analyze compensating strategies such as reducing edible food fed to animals and turned into biofuels, reducing food waste, burning wood in landfills for energy, phosphorus, and potassium, and planting a high fraction of legumes to fix nitrogen. We find that these techniques could feed everyone, but extracting calories from agricultural residues, fishing with wind-powered ships and the backup plan of expanding planted area could feed everyone several times over.

Keywords[edit | edit source]

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solar storm, high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, computer virus, global catastrophic risk, existential risk, industry, food, electricity

See also[edit | edit source]

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Feeding Everyone No Matter What- Cambridge
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Feeding Everyone No Matter What
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Additional Information[edit source]

Davos IDRC Conference[edit source]

FA info icon.svg Angle down icon.svg Page data
Authors Joshua M. Pearce
License CC-BY-SA-3.0
Language English (en)
Related 0 subpages, 38 pages link here
Impact 610 page views
Created September 14, 2016 by Joshua M. Pearce
Modified July 14, 2023 by Felipe Schenone
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