FLAGRI Scenario Builder · Page 1 of 5

People & Nutrition

Set who you are feeding, their Daily Intake, and for how long. The figures published in the FLAGRI study4 are the defaults — change any value to fit your own community or scenario, and reset to return to the paper.

Calculated requirement — updates as you change the settings below
People
—
Period
—
Food energy / day
—
all people combined
Energy, whole period
—
Protein / day
—
all people combined
Protein, whole period
—
All paper defaults ✓
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People

Paper default

The number of individuals to be fed. The study modelled all of New Zealand — 5,114,800 people, the population as at 2021.1 A district, town or community can enter its own number instead; the need scales directly with people.

Number of peoplepaper: 5,114,800
Worth knowing: the population has grown since the study's 2021 data — Stats NZ estimates ≈5,361,300 at March 2026 (provisional); use the chip to try it (marked as a tool extension). The model scales linearly, so any community answer is arithmetically sound — but national comparison figures (e.g. "% of NZ grain land") stop being meaningful at community scale. Local land and context get their own settings on the Land & Context page.

 

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Daily Intake

Paper default

What one person consumes per day, on average — 8,686 kJ of food energy1 and 81 g of protein,2 from national nutrition-survey data. This is what New Zealanders currently eat, held steady — not a survival ration. Land is worked out for each intake separately, and whichever needs more land decides the answer — protein is what makes potatoes need extra land.

Food energy — kJ / person / daypaper: 8,686
Protein — g / person / daypaper: 81
Worth knowing: these are broad-stroke population averages — every person differs, and Daily Intake doesn't yet cover everything a body needs: fat, micronutrients and drinking water are not modelled. And because it holds current consumption steady rather than a bare survival figure, the land answers are deliberately comfortable minimums of land, not a diet plan.

Future addition: more intakes (fat, key micronutrients) slot in under the same Daily Intake umbrella as further checks.

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Time period

Paper default

How long the people must be fed. The study works in whole years — crop yields are annual figures.4 Our recommendation is to keep one year; other periods are still possible and simply scale the requirement up or down.

Period — monthspaper: 12 (one year)
Worth knowing: the calculation always runs on annual yields in the background; a 3-month figure is the yearly answer scaled by ¼. Growing seasons and crop cycles are not modelled — food takes time to grow and is not ready on day one. A short period tells you how much food is needed, not whether it could be grown within that window.

Future addition: crop cycles per year (e.g. one potato cycle per year in cold climates) and time-to-first-harvest.

⠿ Boxes are self-contained settings modules — drag a header to reorder. The same module can be placed on any page of the builder later.

References for this page

  1. Wilson N, Prickett M, et al. (2023) — NZ population (2021) and per-capita food energy intake, as used in the FLAGRI study (Table 2).
  2. Wilson N, Payne B, et al. (2023) — per-capita protein intake (Table 2). Both intake figures are current average consumption from national nutrition-survey data ("Daily Intake"), not survival minimums.
  3. Population totals for the whole period are calculated from the rows above, matching the study's model values (16.2 trillion kJ and 151.2 billion g per annum at defaults).
  4. Boyd M, Ragnarsson S, Terry E, Payne B & Wilson N (2024). Mitigating imported fuel dependency in agricultural production: Case study of an island nation’s vulnerability to global catastrophic risks. Risk Analysis. DOI 10.1111/risa.14297.

In the full builder, all references live on one dedicated page; boxes carry only the small numbers, to keep the settings uncluttered.