Where on Earth would you actually be safest if a global catastrophe hit

A new study assessing which countries would best survive a global catastrophe, such as a nuclear war, a supervolcano eruption or a pandemic, has ranked Australia as the most resilient place on the planet. Researchers built the ranking by combing through decades of food security, biological-weapons and volcanology research, looking for the qualities that let some regions endure world-altering shocks better than others. No country came out fully protected, the researchers found, but some regions are positioned to weather far more of these events than others.

The findings, published Aug. 23, 2026, in the journal Global Challenges, are meant to fill a gap in disaster planning that mostly ignores the rarest and most severe risks in favor of smaller, more frequent emergencies.

Why Global Catastrophic Risks Are Hard to Study

Global catastrophic risks are defined in the study as events capable of killing more than 10 percent of the world’s population over months or years, a threshold that includes nuclear conflict, a massive volcanic eruption, an asteroid strike, an engineered pandemic or a geomagnetic storm severe enough to collapse power grids. Study first author Florian Ulrich Jehn, a researcher at FernUniversität in Hagen, Germany, said such catastrophes are inherently understudied because they are rare. “That makes them easy to ignore,” Jehn told Live Science, even though the consequences of one occurring would be severe and long-lasting for the communities involved.

Three Kinds of Catastrophe the Study Modeled

The research grouped potential catastrophes into three broad categories: events that block out sunlight, such as nuclear winter or an enormous volcanic eruption; events that destroy critical infrastructure, including geomagnetic storms or coordinated cyberattacks; and biological hazards, meaning natural or engineered disease outbreaks capable of killing large shares of the population. Jehn and his co-authors said most of these scenarios share a common failure point: agriculture. “The food system is often the thing that gets you,” Jehn said, since crop failures and the collapse of trade networks tend to compound whatever damage the initial event causes.

What Separates a Resilient Region From a Vulnerable One

To rank countries, the researchers looked for traits that let communities keep feeding and governing themselves through past disruptions. Wealthier nations with a strong domestic industrial base fared better in the model, largely because residents there can manufacture goods that would otherwise have to be imported once global trade breaks down. Geography mattered too: large islands can isolate more easily than countries on a shared landmass, but only if they are not dependent on imported food or fuel, a weakness the study said would leave a trade-reliant island such as Japan badly exposed. Functional, less unequal governance also improved a region’s odds, since a country’s political system heavily influences whether it makes sound decisions once a crisis has begun.

Why Australia Topped the Ranking

Australia came out on top for several converging reasons: it sits in the Southern Hemisphere, far from the countries most likely to be drawn into a nuclear exchange, and it produces enormous quantities of food across a range of climate zones while maintaining significant energy infrastructure. The study’s authors cautioned that Australia’s alliance with the United States could still raise its exposure to nuclear conflict, underscoring their broader finding that no single location is protected against every category of risk.

Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand Round Out the Top Tier

Argentina, Brazil and New Zealand followed Australia in the rankings, each with its own tradeoffs. New Zealand’s active volcanoes, small industrial base and vulnerability to tsunamis pulled it below Australia despite its isolation, while Brazil and Argentina scored lower because of high inequality and histories of political instability, factors the researchers linked to weaker crisis governance. Iceland was also considered a contender for its isolation, but its far-northern location leaves it more exposed to temperature collapse if a catastrophe were to block out sunlight.

How the Northern Hemisphere and the United States Compare

The United States ranked well below the top tier. Its location and infrastructure leave it exposed to geomagnetic storms, and its status as a nuclear power places it closer to the center of any nuclear conflict, alongside other nuclear states including the United Kingdom, France, Russia, Pakistan, India and Israel. The study’s authors also pointed to the country’s uneven COVID-19 outcomes as a governance warning sign, attributing them in part to a lack of political will and weak social cohesion. David Denkenberger, director of the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters and a researcher at the University of Canterbury who was not involved in the study, said the findings mark a useful step toward understanding these risks but that more work is needed to weigh how likely and how severe each scenario actually is, since resilience factors often involve real tradeoffs between different types of catastrophe.

Jehn said the findings are meant to inform practical planning rather than raise alarm: national risk registers and international trade agreements could be built around these regional strengths and weaknesses well before a catastrophe forces the issue. “When global catastrophes happen, then you would likely have to restructure the food system,” he said, adding that the chance of finding a workable compromise grows slimmer once a disaster is already underway. The full study is available through its publication record in Global Challenges, and additional detail on the ranking and its methodology is available in Live Science’s report on the research.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.