How bad are the growing conditions? One number drives it: how far crop yields fall. Normal conditions are 0%. The study's severe case — a 150 Tg nuclear winter — cuts New Zealand yields by 61%.1 The same cut applies to every crop, including the canola meant to replace the fuel.
The percentage lost from every crop's normal yield. 0% is the paper's baseline; 61% is its severe nuclear-winter case.1 Anything in between is yours to explore — drought, volcanic ash, a milder winter.
"Tg" is teragrams of soot lofted into the stratosphere by nuclear conflict — the driver of nuclear winter. Modelling by Xia et al. (2022)1 translates soot into yield loss for New Zealand:
| Scenario | NZ yield loss | |
|---|---|---|
| Normal conditions | 0% | |
| Regional conflict · 5 Tg | 7.9% | |
| Severe nuclear winter · 150 Tg | 61% |
Future addition: intermediate soot scenarios (16–47 Tg) if author-endorsed figures are available.
One factor, applied uniformly to wheat, potatoes, dairy pasture and canola — matching the paper. Cutting the biofuel crop too is what makes severe scenarios bite twice: less food per hectare, and less fuel per canola hectare.
Future addition: per-crop reduction factors as a research-mode option.
⠿ Boxes are self-contained settings modules — drag a header to reorder. The same module can be placed on any page of the builder later.
In the full builder, all references live on one dedicated page; boxes carry only the small numbers.