Should nuclear war break out, Australia may be the best place to survive after researchers from Queensland University of Technology analyzed the impact of a nuclear weapon detonation on the world’s food supply. famine.
In almost all countries, livestock and fish production will not be able to make up for the decline in crop production.
The study found that even warfare on a regional scale devastated the world’s food supply, reducing food production by 7% over a few years.
Ryan Heneghan, from the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Queensland University of Technology, was part of an international team investigating scenarios ranging from regional conflicts to the global Holocaust.
“A relatively small nuclear war would be a global catastrophe in terms of food supplies,” he told the AAP.
The team used computer models to simulate the effects of nuclear fire smoke on climate and crops.
The research paper concludes that calorie intake is less than resting energy expenditure in most other countries of the world, but not in Australia and New Zealand.
“Australia has enough food to be self-sufficient…we can produce enough food for our people, but getting it to the heart of a big city is another matter,” Henegan said. Told.
Australia also produces enough wheat to feed its population, accounting for nearly 50% of the country’s caloric intake.
“We (Australians) eat wheat so we can keep growing enough wheat to feed us,” he said.
New Zealand will also be less affected than other countries.
If war breaks out, the two countries would likely experience an influx of refugees from Asia and elsewhere driven by food insecurity, the researchers found.
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would result in more than 2 billion deaths from famine, but that figure would increase to over 5 billion due to conflict between the United States and Russia.
It is the first to examine the effects of a regional nuclear war on food supplies, agriculture, fisheries and the climate, researchers say.
“This is the first study to pull all of this together to get a full picture of what can happen,” Heneghan said.
The peer-reviewed study was published August 16 in the online journal Nature Food.
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Australian Associated Press is an Australian news agency.