Admissions of extreme, eco-caused national security threats foreground importance of climate adaptation to bring much needed urgency and agency.
On the minor matter of a security assessment that went to COBRA that the UK Government tried to bury…and which says that imminent likely ecological collapses are a fateful national security threat for this country. Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read explore the implications, including crucially what can be done about it.
It is a terrible but, it would seem, deliberate irony that just as all the world’s attention was on bellicose threats from Trump, an official report has been sneaked out that demonstrates that even larger risks are posed: by ecosystem collapse.
This is a report which, unlike predecessors, can’t be waved away as ‘overstatement’ from ‘usual suspects’ (i.e. environmental organisations or academics): it’s from very *unusual* suspects – ie the country’s intelligence chiefs – and they don’t pull their punches…
Consider this headline “key judgement” from the report, which comes with “High” confidence:
“Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse ([i.e.] irreversible loss of function beyond repair).”
And this inference that they draw from it:
“Without significant increases in 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.”
This sort of language is unprecedented in official documents at large, and in particular in security assessments.
Perhaps that’s why the Government didn’t want us to see it at all. They tried to suppress it, as reported last October. Now they have been forced to release it; they tried to smuggle it out…in the middle of the Greenland crisis. The Times has now revealed that the 14 page document is only a summary of a longer piece of work; and has brought some further tidbits of that deeply-concerning longer report into the public domain.
What a scandal, that the Government is still stopping citizens from knowing what they (we) are up against. But the ultimate scandal is quite simply that citizens have been left not knowing exactly what horrors we are likely to have to endure in the coming years. Every one of us has a right to know the full, unexpurgated version of what is in this security assessment: because otherwise we aren’t informed enough to be able to start to try to adapt to the national-security and local-living implications of these forecasted ecosystem collapses.
It’s likely that the Government keeps trying to hush this report up in various ways because it shows starkly that they are failing to keep us safe. But it is possible that an additional motivation is that they fear that citizens can’t cope with the very bad news contained in the report. If they are motivated by that thought, then we need to insist on a different logic:
Politicians/experts must stop telling the public only what we think it can manage to bear and instead create the conditions for people to turn true knowledge into action. This requires local, practical, depolarising preparedness-building, that naturally creates capacity for further agency. It requires too emotional support to deal with and process the difficult truths, including those outlined in this report, and collective awareness among the silent majority that you are absolutely not alone in fearing collapse. The new security assessment requires these as its concomitants, or it may just cause depression or defeatism.
It is meaningless to recognise the gravity of the impending climate/nature collapses without taking mutually self-protective action to build resilience and to adapt, strategically: which means building decarbonisation and nature-recovery into one’s efforts throughout. Luckily, increasing numbers of citizens are engaged in building just such resilience from the bottom up. But they badly need help from the top, too, if their efforts are to be sufficient. For, as the UK’s Office of Environmental Protection recently laid out, the U.K. Government is grossly failing thus far to adequately protect biodiversity and ecology. Consider for example that the OEP singled out “reduced risk of harm from natural hazards” as an area where Government action has slipped back over the last year; exactly consonant with the new “Ecological Collapse and National Security” report which this column is about.
Implementing a strategy of very-well-resourced, nature-based based climate adaptation is the most important single thing we need to do, once we have taken on board the awful forecasts contained in this report. The Government will be risking the lives of many citizens — and irrevocably so — if it does not swiftly put together a very-well-funded plan of preparedness (including, crucially, adequately resourcing local efforts tailored to local circumstance, impacts and threats) to enable us all to cope with what is going to be coming at us over the next decade. This is now definitively a national security threat: let’s treat it like one.
An effective coalition to demand that this report be the basis of a step-change in Britain’s strategic preparedness for impacts, to reach the same kind of level of seriousness as the Government’s ‘missions’, might be able to convince the current government to act. And even if it didn’t, it could certainly lay the groundwork for some level of unity in a ‘Popular Front’, an alternative to the disastrous denialism of Badenoch and Farage. For parties such as the LibDems and the Greens will surely find common ground here, and a post-Starmer pre-2029 Labour Government could meet them on that common ground: for the common good, and to prevent all our efforts being swept away. This is another reason why we ought to move to a kind of war footing.
Moreover, doing so could provide a basis for the international solidarity recently called for so well by Mark Carney at Davos. For, after all, everyone knows that ultimately this is a matter for us all, wherever we live. Developing preparedness together will be a great way to build a spirit of mutual protection.
For what our Government’s own forecasts now say is likely coming.
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(Thanks to Liam Kavanagh for invaluable research- and editorial- help with this piece.)
