Support ALLFED at a critical juncture for global food resilience

By JuanGarcia @ 2025-11-18T11:44 (+55)

Summary

As part of Marginal Funding Week, I want to share how Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED) would use additional resources beyond the support we expect to receive from major funders. We are deeply grateful for the support of everyone who has contributed to the substantial progress we’ve achieved over the years, going from a bold project idea to the creation of a new subfield of research and its implementation. We now have scoped out the technology to produce enough food for humanity even in some of the most extreme scenarios possible, though policy and economic pathways still need to be developed. However, we’ve already made tangible progress on implementation through both institutional plans and community-level technology solutions.

Projects that may not happen without your support include: research on surviving a total nuclear war scenario with maximal infrastructure disruption ($80,000), development of contingency plans to protect vital sectors against extreme pandemics ($80,000), policy work to implement our resilience recommendations ($60,000+), and a technology demonstration for maintaining basic survival needs if critical infrastructure collapsed ($30,000).

How ALLFED creates impact

• Centred on one of humanity's greatest vulnerabilities: We are one of the very few organisations whose core mission is to answer “How does the world avoid civilizational collapse if global agriculture or industry fail?” rather than just working on conventional disasters.
• Bridges modelling and engineering: ALLFED doesn’t just publish scenario papers. We design and prototype actual technologies and operational plans (e.g. resilient transport, off-grid water, nuclear-winter crop pilots) that governments and industry can adopt.
• Targets neglected interventions: Our projects (e.g. pandemic failsafes for critical workers, nuclear-winter crop expansion plans, resilient foods with minimal infrastructure) are too specialized and cross-cutting to fit neatly into existing AI/bio/climate buckets, making them especially neglected.
• Global networks: We work with researchers and policymakers in multiple regions (Australia, Southeast Asia, the Americas, EU) so that plans are locally grounded and to increase humanity’s chances of navigating these shocks successfully.
• Turning small investments into lasting solutions: Many of our projects, such as a nuclear-winter growth-chamber experiment, car-retrofit for electricity production, converting an oven to be a wood-burning stove, and extreme pandemic air filtration playbook, run on modest budgets but create public goods that can be reused by many actors over decades.
• Robust multi-level interventions: We engage with national and international institutions to implement response planning and resilience policies, while also developing decentralized technology that communities can use to fulfill their essential needs in case of insufficient institutional capacity.

Details on cost-effectiveness can be found here.

Why is our work important? Why is donating now particularly impactful?

ALLFED works to help build resilience to global catastrophic food system failure through research, development, policy, and planning. This means resilience to agricultural catastrophes, such as nuclear winter or an engineered crop pandemic, or disasters disrupting global electricity and industry, such as an extreme pandemic or AI-enabled cyberattacks. These catastrophes could lead to billions of deaths and cause long-term damage, possibly even resulting in the collapse of civilization without recovery. This is particularly pressing now that leading AI scientists are calling for stronger action on AI risks from world leaders, citing concerns including large-scale cybercrime and development of novel biological weapons (engineered pandemics and crop pathogens). To complicate things, tensions due to AI race dynamics and geopolitical shifts may make nuclear war more likely, and AI may already be implemented in nuclear weapons systems and decision making. We join other researchers in calling for a multilayered defense against AI risk that involves societal resilience, such as rapid response and backup plans for critical infrastructure disruptions.

As one of the most prolific organizations in global catastrophic risk research, in 2025 ALLFED has released 16 research papers on how to best increase preparedness against agricultural catastrophes. Our flagship studies—from the agenda-setting Global Catastrophic Food Failure paper and analyses of food trade disruption, nuclear winter nutrition, and abrupt infrastructure loss, to work on seaweed cultivation, emerging power-to-food technologies, and urban water vulnerability—are already informing discussions at EGU25, UNDRR, and other security and disaster risk reduction fora. We continue to develop appropriate technologies to fulfill essential needs (food, energy, water, heating, transport, communications) in the event of industrial collapse and we have opened doors for policy change, including federal collaborations in Australia, a policy circular for regional collaboration with Southeast Asia, and an engagement in Brazil. For a deep dive into ALLFED’s achievements in 2025, stay tuned for our Highlights post next week.

However, since 2024, most funders supporting work on global catastrophic risk have shifted the vast majority of their efforts toward AI safety, AI policy, and AI-driven biorisk^[1], while others are preoccupied with the global health gap left by USAID. As a result, little funding is available for “what if prevention fails?” work. This has already forced ALLFED to halve its programmes and team in 2025, leaving several key food-security projects on hold. Sustaining our core team and top-priority projects for one year requires around $400,000—beyond what we expect from major funders. 

This higher bar makes marginal funding unusually powerful: individual donations this year may be more pivotal than ever in determining which projects move forward or remain plans on paper.

To further address this funding gap, a small group of dedicated donors will match all gifts to ALLFED 1:1, up to $20,000, from November 25 to December 9, 2025 (in your local timezone). The match is conditional, meaning your gift leads to funds for ALLFED that would otherwise support other causes.

Below are the projects where individual donations are most likely to make the largest difference over a year.

Projects in need of funding

Research: Our work at the intersection of biorisk and provision of basic needs (food, energy, water, transport, communications) is particularly dependent on individual donors. We want to continue our research line on pandemic failsafes, such as developing contingency plans to protect vital sectors. For example, rapidly scalable interventions to reduce pandemic transmission, such as rapid scaling of indoor air quality interventions like germicidal UV, filtration, ventilation, glycol vapors and temporary housing for workers to offset shortages of advanced PPE would be valuable. We estimate the need as ~1 FTE+support ($80,000). A student final year project on ventilation increase for extreme pandemics is estimated at ($30,000) for sponsorship, materials, and advising costs.

Continuing research on scenarios combining a global food production collapse with a collapse of global industry and supply chains (e.g., full-scale nuclear war with EMP) is crucial—not only to understand how to maximize humanity’s chances of survival, but also how to best help regions likely to be a target of the nuclear attacks, such as the USA and the EU (where nuclear EMP is very likely even if it is not globally widespread). With further modelling of the effects of nuclear war on critical infrastructure (agriculture, food distribution, industry, finance, trade, healthcare) we can better understand how to prepare robust responses that work on scenarios of varying degrees of severity, including our current expected median NATO-Russia full-scale nuclear war scenario of ~30 Tg ASRS (~35% loss of agricultural yields from climate), ⅓–½ of global industrial disruption (~20% yield loss from agricultural input disruptions), and widespread trade breakdowns. We estimate the need as ~1 FTE+support ($80,000).

Policy: Our policy team has identified several priority projects: 1) Australia food system resilience strategy ($90,000-130,000), 2) Southeast Asia regional preparedness initiative ($90,000-140,000), 3) European Union critical infrastructure policy ($60,000-80,000), 4) Convincing fluorescent bulb manufacturers to advocate for indoor air quality standards that would likely require large amounts of  germicidal UV, dramatically increasing the stock of UV bulbs that could be used in an extreme pandemic that could lead to a global catastrophic food system failure ($80,000-120,000). Feel free to ask for more details about these - we are open to receiving specific funding for one particular project you would be particularly excited about. Even a fraction of this funding would enable our policy team to continue making progress in one of these or a similar high-priority engagement.

Technology development: Our project on retrofitting cars in catastrophic scenarios will enable us to develop a blueprint for maintaining minimal power and transport needs if critical infrastructure fails. We want to secure enough support for this ongoing project, as even a modest amount of funding (~$30,000) would enable student projects to continue another year, eventually unlocking a decentralized scalable method to keep water and food flowing.

More examples

Here are additional examples of the types of work we would expect to do with if we had more resources:

1. Continuing work on the most promising resilient food interventions for a nuclear war and other global catastrophic food shocks, 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 are also working to create an integrated economic model to inform responses, and aim to continue research on more exploratory interventions.
2. Continuing research on 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), including designing resilient backup communication and transportation systems, defining how an effective resilient food+water+energy response to this scenario would look, and developing the required methods and tool designs to achieve it.
3. Continuing work on pilot projects to implement resilience. Below are the two most important pilots we would perform with further funding; for a long list of pilot ideas see here. 

Thank you

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

1. ^{^}

    For example, the Survival and Flourishing Fund has almost entirely wound down the fraction it is giving for GCR work outside the topics of AI policy, AI safety, and AI-driven biorisk. Open Philanthropy does not currently report priorities in GCR work like nuclear, climate, or civilizational resilience in general outside of AI and bio, and only a very small fraction of its funding appears to be going towards these causes. See also Ben Todd’s updates on the EA catastrophic risk landscape and nuclear specifically. Among EA GCR funders, only Founders Pledge and Longview Philanthropy seem to be active in the nuclear space.