Nobody is preparing for the worst day in history
Live Science · 2026-09-02
Florian Ulrich Jehn warns that humanity is largely unprepared for "Black Swan" events, or highly improbable yet catastrophic incidents, that could trigger global famine with little to no warning. He highlights that despite recent turbulent times like COVID-19 and ongoing conflicts, global leaders are not adequately planning for large-scale catastrophes. Such events, including volcanic eruptions, nuclear war, or asteroid impacts, could drastically affect the food system by blocking sunlight and causing widespread harvest failures, with estimates suggesting a 90% drop in global calorie production in the most extreme nuclear war scenario. Current national risk registers, even in countries like the U.K. and Switzerland, consider only relatively small-scale events, failing to account for multi-million death scenarios or trillion-pound economic impacts from these larger threats.