Luisa Rodriguez

Researching plans to allow humanity to meet nutritional needs after a nuclear war that limits conventional agriculture.

This small grant will allow Adin Richards to spend the fall up-skilling as a longtermist researcher by conducting research on civilizational collapse and resilience. Adin is an undergraduate at Brown University, studying Geology-Biology and Public Health.

The funding will cover Adin’s wages while he works on a research project under the supervision of Mike Hinge, a researcher at ALLFED. From the application (lightly edited for brevity):

“Nuclear war is perhaps the best known and oldest anthropogenic x-risk, and while we have avoided it for decades, there is a disturbing litany of near misses. Nuclear deproliferation, no-first-use policies, and improved international relations and communications help address the first two layers of defense against extinction from a large nuclear exchange: prevention and response. However, these and other efforts have not brought the risk of a nuclear war starting and escalating to zero, leaving us vulnerable to this as one of several pressing extinction threats, and less attention has been paid to improving resilience.

Luisa Rodriguez has explored the likelihood that different societal collapse scenarios quickly lead to extinction, and much of the uncertainty in this research centers on the extent of post-catastrophe resource conflict and the ability of initial survivors to restart food production. By exploring the biophysical possibility of continuing agriculture following severe climate change, this project lays the groundwork for contingency plans to bolster resilience, decreasing the likelihood that even if a nuclear conflict arises and escalates, humanity, and possibly some semblance of global civilization, can still survive. […]

In my work in global food security, I’ve seen how an often-bemoaned source of vulnerability to smaller scale production shocks is a lack of pre-disaster agreements between countries on how to respond to emergencies, such as pacts that would limit sudden export bans or designations of surplus resources for humanitarian purposes. ALLFED hopes to consult with national and international agencies to help institute emergency plans, but first needs a fleshed-out map of the possibility space before these can be drawn up and agreed to. Success in this project will mean arriving at a comprehensive picture of what preparatory actions and disaster responses would maximize the ability of society to continue meeting its nutritional needs through agricultural adaptations, so that decision makers are empowered to implement these.

On a more personal level, … this project represents an opportunity for me to develop and apply skills like cost effectiveness assessment, empirical modelling, going through the process of writing and hopefully publishing policy-relevant findings, and potentially advocating for decision makers to prioritize longtermist considerations in governance.”

I agree with Adin that the ability to restart some level of food production following civilizational collapse is an important consideration in understanding whether civilization is likely to rebound from collapse, though I’m not sure whether the output from this particular project will end up being especially helpful in resolving that uncertainty, or will end up making it to the policymakers ALLFED hopes to reach.

Despite that uncertainty, I’m excited about the idea of Adin getting more research experience and becoming more involved with the longtermist community, as I think he shows promise as a researcher. I spoke with Adin and thought he displayed impressive subject-area knowledge despite being relatively new to those fields. I've also received some good references for him. Finally, his undergraduate studies in Geology-Biology and Public Health at Brown, a top American university, are relevant to his proposed project as well as a broader range of longtermist cause areas he’s exploring, including biosecurity. This makes me think he’s on track to become well-suited for longtermist research more generally.