Preface. China has the largest navy in the world now, at some point during collapse it would be easy to invade Australia, New Zealand, and other refuges. And anyone else who can sail.  In hard times, the property rights of rich foreigners are not likely to be respected. I doubt there’s a safe lifeboat out there unless you manage to store 20 years of food and live in a cave, and able to emerge and grow your own food.  One can only hope the uncontacted tribes in South America and Hazda in Tanzania make it through…

Other hidey-holes for the rich are islands: 2020 The Island Brokers Are Overwhelmed. “Construction on private islands takes far more time than on the mainland or even on typical, nonprivate islands. And brokers cannot guarantee that islands will be safe havens from civil unrest…Some cost less than $100,000, like the small, rock-strewn strips of land in Canadian lakes. Others reach eight- and nine-digit sums and offer airstrips and prebuilt resorts in turquoise waters in the Caribbean and the South Pacific.

There are 2 articles below, a recent one about the places most likely to survive collapse (that doesn’t mention peak energy, but the scientific paper itself sees peak oil as a major factor) and the second one is where the mega rich are fleeing to.

Alice Friedemann  www.energyskeptic.com Women in ecology  author of 2021 Life After Fossil Fuels: A Reality Check on Alternative Energy best price here; 2015 When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation”, Barriers to Making Algal Biofuels, & “Crunch! Whole Grain Artisan Chips and Crackers”.  Podcasts: Crazy Town, Collapse Chronicles, Derrick Jensen, Practical Prepping, KunstlerCast 253, KunstlerCast278, Peak Prosperity

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Carrington D (2021) New Zealand rated best place to survive global societal collapse. The Guardian.

See the scientific study here: King N, Jones A (2021) An Analysis of the Potential for the Formation of ‘Nodes of Persisting Complexity’. Sustainability.  From the scientific paper (much better & far more detailed than The Guardian):

From worst to best: Singapore 4, Luxembourg 4, Switzerland 6, Austria 6, Korea 6, Netherlands 6, Finland 8, Denmark 8, Sweden 8, Germany 8, Japan 8, France 8, Norway 9, Canada 10, USA 10, Iceland 11, UK 11 Ireland 12, New Zealand 13, Australia 13 (see Tables 3 & 5 for details of score)

“The British Isles, Scandinavia, Patagonia, Tasmania and the South Island of New Zealand are identified as locations that migrants may seek to relocate to in this scenario. With the global average temperature increased by 4 °C, much of the land in the tropical and subtropical latitudes may become unproductive and depopulated, and inundated coastlines are common throughout the world with Scandinavia, the British Isles and New Zealand identified as potential lifeboats. Using the perspective of the Gaia Hypothesis, northern Canada, Russia, Scandinavia, New Zealand and the British Isles (along with mountainous regions at lower latitudes) may remain habitable through the persistence of agriculture and may therefore act as ‘lifeboats’ for populations of humans.

Alternatively, a protracted ‘energy descent’ following the passing of peak oil, combined with the effects of climate change, can also lead to different future scenarios including ‘Lifeboats’, which is a most pessimistic scenario, describing severe climatic changes combined with economic collapse leading to general decline in societal complexity, with isolated, localised pockets surviving as the indicated ‘lifeboats’, and is the most closely aligned with the scenario posited in this study.”

The researchers said human civilization was “in a perilous state” due to the highly interconnected and energy-intensive society that had developed. Collapse may come for many reasons, including peak oil, financial crises, pandemics, ongoing destruction of ecosystems, and climate change.

To assess which nations would be most resilient to such a collapse, countries were ranked according to their ability to grow food for their population, protect their borders from unwanted mass migration, and maintain an electrical grid and some manufacturing ability. Islands in temperate regions and mostly with low population densities came out on top.

They said that a globalized society that prized economic efficiency damaged resilience, and that spare capacity needed to exist in food and other vital sectors.

New Zealand was found to have the greatest potential to survive relatively unscathed due to its geothermal and hydroelectric energy, abundant agricultural land and low human population density.

Emma O’Brien. November 5 2016. The Mega rich have found an unlikely new refuge. Bloomberg.

When Hong Kong-based financier Michael Nock wanted a place to escape in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, he looked beyond the traditional havens of the rich to a land at the edge of the world, where cows outnumber people two-to-one.

Nock, the founder of hedge fund firm Doric Capital bought a retreat 9300 km away in New Zealand’s picturesque Queenstown. In the seven years since, terror threats in Europe and political uncertainty from Britain to the US have helped make the South Pacific nation – a day by air away from New York or London – a popular bolthole for the mega wealthy.

Isolation has long been considered New Zealand’s Achilles heel. That remoteness is turning into an advantage, however, with hedge-fund pioneer Julian Robertson to Russian steel titan Alexander Abramov and Hollywood director James Cameron establishing multi-million-dollar hideaways in the New Zealand countryside.

“The thing that was always working against New Zealand – the tyranny of distance – is the very thing that becomes its strength as the world becomes more uncertain,” Nock, 60, said by phone from Los Angeles during a recent business trip.

Nock’s estate is named “Giverny” after artist Claude Monet’s iconic home and garden in northern France, and the “funny old farmhouse” is surrounded by ponds and mature plants, he said. Nock is converting a barn into an art studio on the property, which overlooks Queenstown’s Shotover River – a fast-flowing, turquoise stretch of water that tourists speed down on jet boats and whitewater rafts.

Twice the size of England, but with less than a tenth of its people, New Zealand ranks high on international surveys of desirable places to live, placing among the top 10 for democracy, lack of corruption, peace and satisfaction. With its $NZ250 billion economy dominated by farming and tourism, the nation last week overtook Singapore as the best country in the world to do business and was rated second to the Southeast Asian nation as the top place to live for expatriates in a survey by HSBC Holdings in September.

House prices in New Zealand increased 12.7 per cent in the year through October, and the average price in largest city Auckland has almost doubled since 2007 to more than $1 million.

Chinese retirees

Jack Ma, founder of e-retailing behemoth Alibaba Group Holding and China’s richest man, told Prime Minister John Key in April that he’d like to buy a home in his country, according to the New Zealand Herald. At least 20 of Ma’s 40-something colleagues have retired there, the newspaper said.

Key, a former currency trader, once described New Zealand as “England without the attitude.” It’s changed leaders just twice in almost 17 years and the last hint of terrorism came a generation ago, when French spies bombed a Greenpeace campaigning ship docked in Auckland harbor in 1985.

It’s that kind of stability that’s attracting a wave of Brexit-inspired migration to the island nation that gained prominence as the otherworldly backdrop to the Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit films.

New Zealand received 998 registrations from UK nationals interested in moving to the country the day after the referendum on European Union membership, versus 109 the day before the vote, according to data from the immigration department. That grew to 10,647 registrations in the 49 days after June 23, more than double the same period a year earlier.

Escaping hell

“If the world is going to go to hell in a hand basket, they’re in the best place they could possibly be,” said David Cooper, director of client services at Malcolm Pacific Immigration in Auckland, the country’s biggest migration agency. “People want to get the hell out of where they are and they feel that New Zealand is safe.”

Cooper has seen an uptick in inquiries from US citizens over the past few months, he said, with the increasingly raucous presidential fight between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, as well as the recent spate of mass shootings, cited as reasons to flee.

Kim Dotcom

“The world is heading into a major crisis,” said internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom in October. “I saw it coming and that’s why we moved to New Zealand. Far away & not on any nuclear target list.” The German-born founder of megaupload.com was granted residency in 2010, but is now fighting attempts to extradite him to the US.

Successful Kiwis who have worked in investment banking and other lucrative professions in New York and London are also returning home to raise their families, said Ollie Wall, a realtor with Auckland-based Graham Wall Real Estate. The firm helped broker New Zealand’s most expensive house sale in 2013, when a seven-bedroom mansion on the city’s Paritai Drive was sold to a China-born businessman for $39 million.

“The world has got smaller,” Wall said in an email. “You can run multinational corporations from paradise now. So why wouldn’t you?”

Fidelity National Financial Chairman Bill Foley owns a luxury homestead in the Wairarapa region north of Wellington, and Robertson, chair of Tiger Management LLC in New York, owns two of the nation’s most prestigious golf courses and a luxury lodge overlooking Queenstown’s Lake Wakatipu. He says New Zealand is “the most beautiful place on Earth”.

Billionaire Facebook backer Peter Thiel described New Zealand as a “utopia” in 2011 and is reported to have bought residential property in Auckland and Queenstown. Thiel and a spokesman for the PayPal co-founder didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.

New Zealand has actively courted the wealthy. For an investment of $NZ10 million in local assets or funds over a three-year-period, migrants can qualify for residency provided they spent 44 days in New Zealand in each of the two latest years. These investors don’t have to speak English or live for a set amount of time in the country after the qualification period. They also don’t have to become tax residents.

Since the program started six years ago, 121 people have gained so-called Investor Plus visas, and more than 800 have secured a residency pass that requires a $1.5 million investment over four years, government data show.

“It provides a bolthole, a place for ‘just in case’,” said Willy Sussman, a partner at Auckland law firm Bell Gully, which has worked with wealthy migrants from all over the world.

The desire for a haven nestled among snow-capped alps close to an international airport helped house prices in Queenstown increase at more than twice the pace of Auckland in the year through October, reaching an average of $974,564.

Mark Harris, managing director of the town’s Sotheby’s Realty office, said he has sold properties for more than $20 million, including ones with private landing strips.

“We hedge fund people all love optionality,” said Nock, the part-time Queenstown resident from Hong Kong. “Will I live in New Zealand permanently? I’m not sure, but I want the optionality of being able to do that.”