Introduction

As part of Marginal Funding Week, here is a brief update on Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED), describing projects to which marginal funding would most likely be allocated.  There is a much more detailed, in-depth picture of recent accomplishments in the ALLFED 2023 year-in-review, and updates for 2024 will be forthcoming on 18 November. 

ALLFED works to help build resilience to global catastrophic food system failure through research, development, policy, and planning. ALLFED strives to increase preparedness against agricultural catastrophes, such as nuclear winter or an engineered crop pandemic, or disasters disrupting global electricity/industry, such as an extreme pandemic or AI-enabled cyberattack. These catastrophes could lead to billions of deaths and cause long-term damage, possibly even resulting in the collapse of civilization without recovery. Present-generation and long-term cost-effectiveness analyses are presented here. 

ALLFED update

From producing fifteen scientific papers on global catastrophes and forming the first blueprint for an Extreme Pandemic Resilience Plan for Vital Industry to being featured in over 90 media articles, 2024 has been a busy, productive year of impact for ALLFED. However, there is so much more we want to achieve in identifying, developing, and supporting the adoption of resilient food solutions by governments, companies, and communities—solutions that could ensure food security for all during and after a global catastrophe. 

At ALLFED, we are deeply grateful to all our supporters, including the Survival and Flourishing Fund, which has provided the majority of our funding for years. However, this year, we received around one-eighth of the average funding we’ve received from the Survival and Flourishing Fund over the previous three years. While we’re immensely appreciative of their continued support, this shift shortens our runway and emphasizes the need to seek additional funding sources to sustain and expand our impact. Your support at this time could make a particular difference on whether ALLFED will be able to pursue several key projects in 2025. Based on our current fundraising expectations, we think receiving $1,000 - $10,000 each from a few individual donors would make a sizable difference on what we can and cannot do over the next year.

Projects: where is marginal funding likely to be spent?

There are several key projects subject to raising additional funding over the next 12 months:

1. Leverage ALLFED’s research to launch one or more policy advocacy campaigns for response and resilience planning against an abrupt sunlight reduction scenario for one country among: Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, Singapore, New Zealand, and Brazil (costing $100-250k each). The external charity evaluator CEARCH has highlighted this type of campaign as particularly important for saving expected lives against volcanic- and nuclear-winter scenarios.
2. A refrigerated greenhouse simulating nuclear winter (in Australia) could validate models of nuclear winter climate and responses, informing crop expansion recommendations that could produce food for billions ($200-400k). This type of project could be fundamental for proving the viability of hugely promising agricultural interventions against ASRS related to cropland expansion and resilient crop relocation. Embarking on a project of this scale during a time of funding uncertainty is risky, so your support could be crucial in determining whether this happens at all.
3. In collaboration with Good Ancestors (US), build and launch an emergency satellite to transmit information to regular cell phones on response interventions for a catastrophe that disables comms infrastructure (~$300k). In a scenario such as widespread nuclear EMPs, this technology could be fundamental for distributing information on how to provide basic food and water needs to the population.
4. Perform a project aiming to safeguard vital services in extreme pandemics (~$300k). An extreme global pandemic, involving mass infection and resulting absenteeism, poses the risk of collapsing industry, instigating global catastrophic failures in the systems providing food, water, energy, and other basic needs to the world. Our proposal contains a selection of projects in four broad categories. First, investigate and quantify the ability of germicidal UV, filtration, and ventilation to be scaled up rapidly in a crisis (see preliminary research here). Second, profile vital infrastructure and workforce needs during the initial months of an outbreak to map critical workforce vulnerabilities, prioritize sectors, and govern strategic PPE allocation. Third, develop plans to secure food supplies without industrial processing, addressing high-contact, high-risk areas like food processing and distribution and developing post-collapse solutions for basic needs:  low-cost, low-contact solutions to safeguard essential supply chains and prevent societal collapse. Fourth, create strategies to provide clean water in industry-free scenarios, following ALLFED's findings on global freshwater access gaps. Once effective interventions have been designed through this research, the next step would be campaigning for implementation.
5. Perform research on combination scenarios, which is crucial to understand not only how to prevent humanity from surviving a most-extreme scenario involving a global food production collapse combined with a loss of global industry and supply chains (e.g., via a full-scale nuclear conflict involving coordinated nuclear EMP attacks), but also how to best help regions likely to be a target of nuclear attacks in a war, such as the USA and European Union (where nuclear EMP is very likely given nuclear war even if it does not take place globally). We believe it is necessary to overhaul our global catastrophe response modeling project to incorporate varying degrees of severity and catastrophe considerations, including our current expected median NATO-Russia full-scale nuclear war scenario of ~40 Tg ASRS (~45% loss of agricultural yields from climate), ~1/4 of global infrastructure destroyed or disabled (~20% yield loss from disruptions of fertilizers, agricultural machinery, pesticides, and ), and widespread trade breakdowns. We’ve estimated a requirement of ~2 FTE+support to kickstart this ($180,000). 

Here are additional examples presenting more general types of work we would expect to do with additional funding:

1. Continuing work on resilient food interventions that our research has uncovered as fundamental to survival in nuclear winter, including: resilient crop relocation, rapid redirection of crop-intensive animal agriculture and biofuel industries, rapid expansion of planted crop area, greenhouse technology, agricultural residue upcycling, and production of food without agriculture through emerging industrial technologies. We also aim to continue research on more exploratory interventions.
2. Continuing work on our more neglected line of research. Specifically, research into interventions to increase resilience and response capabilities to scenarios involving extreme, abrupt collapse of critical infrastructure (e.g., loss of electricity/industry due to extreme pandemics or nuclear EMP). Elements of this work include, designing low-tech transportation systems, defining how an effective resilient food response to this scenario would look, and developing the required methods and tool designs to achieve it.
3. We are also looking for funding to perform technology demonstrations of key technologies from our list of tech ideas that address current bottlenecks (see some examples in the table below).

Thank you

Our ongoing and deep thanks go to all our donors and volunteers. Other than donating, you can also contribute your time through volunteering with ALLFED, including as a board member. Thank you for your interest and support in increasing the chances of humanity in the face of global catastrophic food system failure.