ARTICLE Cost-Effectiveness of Interventions for Alternate Food to Address Agricultural Catastrophes Globally David C. Denkenberger 1,2 • Joshua M. Pearce 3,4 Published online: 21 September 2016 Ó The Author(s) 2016. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract The literature suggests there is about a 1 % risk per year of a 10 % global agricultural shortfall due to catastrophes such as a large volcanic eruption, a medium asteroid or comet impact, regional nuclear war, abrupt climate change, and extreme weather causing multiple breadbasket failures. This shortfall has an expected mor- tality of about 500 million people. To prevent such mass starvation, alternate foods can be deployed that utilize stored biomass. This study developed a model with liter- ature values for variables and, where no values existed, used large error bounds to recognize uncertainty. Then Monte Carlo analysis was performed on three interven- tions: planning, research, and development. The results show that even the upper bound of USD 400 per life saved by these interventions is far lower than what is typically paid to save a life in a less-developed country. Further- more, every day of delay on the implementation of these interventions costs 100–40,000 expected lives (number of lives saved multiplied by the probability that alternate foods would be required). These interventions plus training would save 1–300 million expected lives. In general, these solutions would reduce the possibility of civilization col- lapse, could assist in providing food outside of catastrophic situations, and would result in billions of dollars per year of return. Keywords Agricultural catastrophe Á Alternate food Á Global catastrophic risk Á Intervention cost- effectiveness 1 Introduction A number of catastrophic events could cause a roughly 10 % global agricultural shortfall, including a medium-sized aster- oid/comet impact (Napier 2008), a large but not super vol- canic eruption, full-scale nuclear war if the impacts are less than anticipated (Turco et al. 1990), regional nuclear war (for example, India-Pakistan (O ¨ zdog ˘an et al. 2013)), abrupt regional climate change (Valdes 2011), complete global loss of bees as pollinators (Aizen et al. 2009), a super crop pest or pathogen, and coincident extreme weather, resulting in mul- tiple breadbasket failures (Bailey et al. 2015). Other events would not directly affect food production, but still could have similar impacts on human nutrition. Some of these include a conventional world war or pandemic that disrupts global food trade, and the resultant famine caused in food-importing countries (Keller 1992; Waldman 2001; Goodhand 2003). Other issues that do not affect food production directly include overreaction to oil prices, phosphorus prices, nitrogen prices, desertification, salinization, erosion, depletion of aquifers, and slow climate change (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 2013). These all could occur with concomitant price speculation, pricing the global poor out of food. Generally, the technical solution for feeding everyone in these scenarios would be to (1) increase cultivated area; (2) & David C. Denkenberger david.denkenberger@colorado.edu; http://gcrinstitute.org/ 1 Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, Calabasas, CA 91302, USA 2 Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering, Tennessee State University, Nashville, TN 37209, USA 3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA 4 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA 123 Int J Disaster Risk Sci (2016) 7:205–215 www.ijdrs.com DOI 10.1007/s13753-016-0097-2 www.springer.com/13753