Stable food supply key to avert extinction from Megacity collapse

Nowadays, many people are aware that a collapse of global civilization is possible – as the UN warned in its 2022 Global Risks report. They are asking: when will this collapse begin? How will we know it has started? Will there be enough forewarning to save ourselves?

There is no easy answer to such questions as collapse depends on many variables, especially on how effectively and fast nations and governments respond worldwide. At present, it is fair to say, they are completely unprepared. There is no global plan of action. There is not even a set of viable national plans of action to save us.

Just as the climate tipping points are signposts to an uninhabitable world, the first failure of a megacity will be a thunderous alarm that global civilisation is in the collapse zone. A failed city of ten million will spew out refugees like a human volcano, precipitating horrors on affected regions like nothing since the famines and wars in Europe, India and Asia of last century. Only on a scale four times larger. This will unleash a deadly domino-chain among neighbouring cities and countries, leading to global economic crisis and a spate of government failures.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent this from happening? The answer is yes – but it needs to happen now – and fast.

The world’s cities need to:

Re-use 100% of the water and nutrients they presently waste, and recycle them into new food locally

Ban all food disposal to landfill and sewage disposal to rivers or oceans. Introduce circular economies that waste nothing.

Plan for a world in which global resources of food and water may undergo periodic, sharp shortages and where food chains shatter without warning.

Put food and water security ahead of all other urban concerns, including transport, development, health, education, local government, recreation.

Foster the rapid growth of industries such as hydroponics, aquaponics, biocultures, sky farms, agritecture, entomoculture, synthetic meat and novel protein and plant foods.

Educate all citizens to waste nothing, to recycle food ‘waste’, and grow more of their own food wherever they live.

Dedicate unused urban areas to food production on rooftops, sidewalks, round schools and hospitals, up the sides of buildings, between roads and under bridges.

Share the best ideas with sister cities at lightspeed via the internet and social media.

Such measures will not prevent the collapse of global civilization. But they may cushion the shock for individual megacities when it happens and save countless lives.

Given the immense creativity, thought and effort that has gone into building our cities, it is astonishing how little care, forethought and ingenuity has gone into seeing they survive in the long run. What happens to cities individually will define what happens to the human species as a whole.

The dream of ‘urban renewal’ in the current century does not mean more parks, arts centres, malls, cosy apartments and gleaming architectural monoliths. For, without secure food and water, none of those things matter.

The city is the cornerstone of human civilisation. It must have a renewable foundation of food and water – or else it is built on quicksand.