To suppress one high-level report into the security impacts of climate and nature collapse seems odd. To suppress two starts to look like a pattern.
The first report was compiled by the joint intelligence committee, the UK’s top security chiefs, including MI5, MI6 and GCHQ. Entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, it was due to be launched, with much fanfare, last October. But then abruptly, without notice, the launch was cancelled. It’s only thanks to a sustained freedom of information campaign from Ruth Chambers at the Green Alliance thinktank that ministers were finally forced to publish something – so back in January they produced a version that was heavily redacted and truncated.
Yet even in its diluted form, the report reveals a frankly terrifying forecast of potential impacts, with warnings that critical ecosystems underpinning global food systems and climate stability are degrading worldwide and every critical ecosystem is now “on a pathway to collapse”. The UK is heavily reliant on food imports, and the report spells out the domestic implications in no uncertain terms: “Without significant increases in the UK food system and supply chain resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.”
In spite of repeated efforts from campaigners and politicians – including most recently the cross-party environmental audit committee – the government is still resolutely refusing to put the full unredacted version into the public domain.
Exactly why this might be – and what the concealed contents might say – are the subject of a new four-part podcast series, “When Nature Becomes a Security Threat”, that I’ve just produced for The Rest Is Politics. It investigates what we know about this suppressed report and why the UK’s intelligence and security establishment now see climate and ecosystem collapse as a national security threat, with guests including former senior army officer Lt Gen Richard Nugee and former diplomat Arthur Snell.
There has been considerable speculation as to why the report has been hidden and then censored. According to the Times, No 10 blocked the release owing to fears it could be considered too negative. Others have pointed to the uncomfortable questions it might raise – particularly in the light of policy decisions that move in the opposite direction, such as reductions in international aid budgets. Indeed, given that it’s long been recognised that aid is one of the most effective ways to reduce the risk of conflict and instability, it’s hard to think of a more misguided, self-defeating decision than cutting aid budgets to fund security and defence.
Indeed, this report was a deeply inconvenient one for Keir Starmer’s government in other ways too. Ministers have repeatedly sought to create a conflict between environmental protection and prosperity (think Rachel Reeves’s war on bats and newts, and her insistence that development trumps nature), yet here are the security services saying that environmental protection is in fact essential to prosperity.
Or take the shocking decision not to invest one penny so far in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, despite being instrumental in the establishment of this global funding mechanism, which was launched last year at the Cop climate talks. How awkward, then, that this assessment concludes unequivocally that tropical forest ecosystems, which play a vital role in global water and food security, are crucial to the UK’s future.
Or consider the recent damning report from the Office for Environmental Protection watchdog which found that the government will not meet its targets to save wildlife in England and is failing on almost all environmental measures: seven of the 10 targets set out in the Environment Act 2021 have little likelihood of being met by the legal deadline of 2030.
Neither the Starmer government, nor Andy Burnham’s, can say it didn’t know
Frankly, an increasingly unavoidable – and shameful – conclusion is that the government chose to try to cover up this vital report simply to save face.
Yet that’s not all. In episode two of the series, we uncover a second report, this time from 2024, commissioned from a now-disbanded “futures team” – an expert group of civil servants at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. It was produced ahead of the 2024 general election to brief an incoming government on long-term risks. Yet, oddly, it wasn’t included in official handover documents, and it’s only come to light quite recently thanks to the investigative persistence of journalist Ben Cooke at the Times.
For a government document, its findings are unusually blunt: Britain’s food and water supply, together with its international trade networks, are “almost certain” to be “on a decline and collapse trajectory”; and climate change, habitat loss and geopolitical instability mean that the UK’s food security is “at risk of catastrophic failure”. Not in some distant future, but potentially by the end of this decade. That could mean empty shelves, rationing, and the state losing its ability to guarantee food supply.
Absorbing the implications of assessments like these is not easy. Statements like “every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse” (with its grimly helpful explainer in parenthesis: in other words, “irreversible loss of function beyond repair”) are difficult to fully process.
They challenge deeply held assumptions about stability, progress and the guarantee of the future. How many of us have looked in awe and wonder at the recent photographs of the Earth taken from the Artemis II spacecraft, and marvelled at its fragile beauty? And how do we then come to terms with the fact that human activity is systematically destroying its ability to sustain life?
It’s heartbreaking and rage-inducing in equal parts. Heartbreaking because this is our one and only precious home. Rage-inducing because governments cannot pretend they didn’t know what they were doing.
How many warnings do we need to have before we intervene to prevent imminent disaster? Scientists have been sending us messages about the growing risk of climate and natural catastrophes with increasing urgency since the 1970s, but while some progress has undoubtedly been made, it’s nowhere near enough.
Economists have repeatedly told us that the cost of saving the planet is far lower than the cost of destroying it – again, it’s not significantly moved the dial.
And now intelligence agencies and security chiefs are spelling it out in stark terms: our national security is at risk. Neither the Starmer government, nor Andy Burnham’s, can say it didn’t know.
The first priority for government is to protect its citizens – and that starts with the release of the full unredacted reports. An early test of Burnham’s government will be whether it’s prepared to do so. Unless and until we know the full scale of the threats we face, the chances of rising to them will remain remote.
Caroline Lucas was the Green Party’s first Member of Parliament and is a former Leader of the Green Party of England and Wales