New study names the best place to ride out a global catastrophe. It isn’t Canada

A windblown, empty municipal road during winter. Bryan Schlosser

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Australia is the country most often named as best able to ride out a global catastrophe. Canada is on the other side of the ledger.

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Florian Ulrich Jehn is the lead author of the first review to map which places on Earth would hold up best in a global catastrophe, published Aug. 23 in the journal Global Challenges.

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The paper defines a global catastrophic risk as the death of a significant share of humanity, most commonly at least 10 per cent of the world’s population within months to years. It reviews 152 documents rather than modelling anything new.

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The authors sorted those threats three ways with the first being sunlight reduction scenarios. That is the review’s term for anything that suddenly blocks out the sun, whether a nuclear war, a large volcanic eruption or an asteroid strike.

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Another is infrastructure loss, usually a long blackout caused by a solar storm, a cyberattack or an electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear weapon detonated at high altitude. The third is a pandemic severe enough to cause mass casualties.

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“In many nuclear winter scenarios agriculture ceases almost completely in Canada,” Jehn said in an email to National Post.

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Canada is strong on biological threats and mediocre on infrastructure collapse, he wrote, and “probably near the worst among wealthy democracies for abrupt sunlight reduction scenarios.”

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Australia is the only country directly named as resilient across all three categories in the research the authors reviewed. New Zealand and Japan were the only others with evidence in all three.

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On nuclear winter, the review lists Canada among the countries identified as particularly at risk, along with the United States, Russia, China, Central Europe and Eastern Europe. High latitude regions in the Northern Hemisphere would take the most cooling, the paper said.

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Jehn put it in terms of where the country starts. Canada is so far north that it begins from a lower base temperature, he wrote, and the temperature effects get stronger the further from the equator a place sits.

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Canada does better on the second category. Geomagnetic storms do not hit everywhere equally, and the zones with the highest likelihood of damage take in Canada, Ireland, the United States, the United Kingdom, northern Germany, the Baltics, New Zealand, Tasmania, Russia and Scandinavia.

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Canada is one of three countries the review named as having hardened its grid against those storms, along with the United States and Sweden. Past storms drove that investment, Jehn wrote. “I think other countries can likely learn from Canada how it worked on adapting to the threat of geomagnetic storms.”

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He attached limits to the grid work. An electromagnetic pulse or a large cyberattack could still take out the grid, he wrote, and Canada trades enough that it would struggle if trade stopped. He is not familiar enough with Canadian industry to make a solid assessment, he wrote.