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Will civilization as we know it end in the next 100 years? Will there be places that work? These questions may sound like dystopian fiction. But in recent headlines extreme weather, climate change, NS ongoing epidemic and faltering global supply chains did you ask them you are not alone

Now two British academics, Aled Jones, Global Sustainability Institute Nick King, at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England, and his co-author, think they have some answers. Their analysis, published in the journal Sustainability in July, aims to identify the best-positioned places to continue when others disperse or disperse. They call these lucky places “nodes of constant complexity.”

Winner, tech billionaires there are shelters already there will be glad to know, New Zealand. The runners-up are Tasmania, Ireland, Iceland, England, the United States and Canada.

The findings were met with skepticism by other scholars who study issues such as climate change and the collapse of civilization. Some disagreed, saying it put too much emphasis on the advantages of the islands and did not properly account for variables such as military strength.

Some said the whole exercise was misguided: If climate change is allowed to disrupt civilization to this degree, no country will have reason to celebrate.

number 1

New Zeland

Professor Jones with a PhD. In cosmology, the branch of astronomy that focuses on the origins of the universe, it is widely concerned with how to make global food systems and global financial systems more resilient. He also says he’s intrigued by the fact that a collapse in one part of the world can lead to a collapse in another, whether caused by extreme weather or something else.

He said he wasn’t sure that climate change would bring about the end of civilization, but that it was on the way to causing a “global shock.”

“We’re lucky if we can hold out,” he added.

The assumption underlying his model is that when many countries collapse simultaneously, the best order for self-sufficiency is most likely to continue working.

He built the University of Notre Dame for his study. Global Harmonization InitiativeIt ranks 181 countries according to their readiness to successfully adapt to climate change. (Norway at the top of the enterprise Country Index; New Zealand comes in second.)

He then added three additional measures: whether the country has enough land to grow food for its people; whether he has the energy capacity to “keep the lights on,” as he put it in an interview; and whether the country is isolated enough to prevent other people from crossing its borders while its neighbors collapse.

New Zealand ranks high in Professor Jones’ analysis because it seems prepared for the weather changes created by climate change. It has plenty of renewable energy capacity, can produce its own food, and is an island, so it scores well on the isolation factor, he said.

number 2

Tasmania

Tasmania, an Australian island state about 150 miles south of the mainland, came in second because it has the infrastructure to adapt to climate change and is agriculturally productive, Professor Jones said.

Linda Shi, a professor who focuses on urban climate adaptation and social justice in Cornell University’s department of city and regional planning, said she appreciated that the study’s authors were thinking long-term and trying to piece together complex information in their analysis of what countries might be like. Fee when temperatures rise by four degrees Celsius.

But it deals with various aspects of the list, starting with Tasmania. “If you’re going to include Tasmania, but you don’t care if the rest of Australia sinks, surely some of a large country like China will find a way to protect its people,” he said.

Professor Shi is also concerned that the dataset underlying the model – the Notre Dame Global Harmonization Initiative – is so strongly associated with per capita income. A nation is not convinced that it will endure because it is rich. Nor does he believe that physical isolation keeps dangers away.

“Boats and nuclear warheads could go to New Zealand,” he said.

Professor Shi also suggested that any model that does not take into account governance or military strength is missing.

Number 3

Ireland

Professor Jones said Ireland was successful primarily because of its agricultural and renewable energy capacity and isolation. Irish press headlines last week it seemed excited for the list.

Joseph Tainter, who wrote a seminal text on social collapse, said that top-ranked countries should not celebrate. sometimes credit with the spawn of the academic subdiscipline.

While praising the work’s ambition, he said the authors did not properly account for the amount of fossil fuels a nation needs to feed itself.

Dr. “Without fossil fuels, agriculture would revert to oxen and human labor,” Tainter said. “In a case of complicating” – the academic term for when things went off the rails – “90 percent of a nation’s population would be farmers as they were in the past.”

Dr. Rather than running at current levels of complexity, Tainter said even a surviving country would face “a social, economic and technological simplification.”

number 4

Iceland

Professor Jones said Iceland is doing well due to its agricultural and renewable energy capacities, as well as its isolation. Additionally, even if the climate changes, it is not expected to force a major change in the functioning of the country’s society.

Justin Mankin, a geography professor at Dartmouth, disagreed.

“The spatial pattern of extreme weather and other hazards caused by global warming will undoubtedly profoundly affect places like the UK, New Zealand, Iceland and Tasmania,” he said.

Number 5

Britain

This surprised even Professor Jones.

“We have always humiliated the UK for not doing enough on climate change,” he said. But he said being an island gives it a huge boost in its capacity to survive an apocalypse.

He insisted he wasn’t biased because he lived there.

number 6

United States and Canada

The United States and Canada shared sixth place. Professor Jones said one factor holding them back was their shared land borders. His model assumes that if masses of helpless people can cross a border, it will be more difficult for a country to maintain stability.

Professor Shi pointed out that this erroneous proposition risks fueling xenophobic impulses.

Professor Jones admits that the idea that mass immigration is bad for a country is “a very simplified idea”, but it’s a way of assessing whether it has enough food while its neighbors are struggling.

Andrew Pershing, director of climate science Climate CenterInstead of focusing on how a country can better cope with a global collapse, scientists should focus on how to avoid that collapse, an organization of scientists and journalists focused on climate change reporting said.

Yes, global temperatures have already risen by a little more than a degree Celsius, he said. But the catastrophic three-degree increase on which Mr. Jones’ model is built is not inevitable.

“We have the means to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” he said. “Instead of thinking about lifeboats, I’m more interested in what we can do to prevent the ship from sinking.”

Professor Jones says people may have misinterpreted his intentions. He doesn’t recommend that people who have the means to do so start buying shelter in New Zealand or Iceland, he said. Instead, he wants other countries to explore ways to increase their resilience.