How many warnings do we need before we intervene to prevent an imminent disaster?
In marketing-speak, people need to see a message at least seven times before they are likely to respond or “convert”.
Scientists have been warning us about the growing risks of climate change, natural disasters, and potentially catastrophic events with increasing urgency since the 1960s, but we have collectively failed to convert.
Well, you may say, wrong business. They’re not selling us an attractive product. And it’s science, which isn’t terribly sexy, and doom is just depressing.
But what about when economists do it? We all know money talks. You’d think a 2020 report for JPMorgan warning that climate change is a threat to the human race might register. After all, it came from the world’s largest fossil fuel financier. They know what they’re doing.
No.
When the actuaries speak out? They’re the experts in assessing risk. The 2025 report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries on Planetary Solvency forewarned, “Current climate policies risk catastrophic societal and economic impacts,” which caused a stir, didn’t it?
Hell, no. By then, businesses, banks and politicians were rowing back on already inadequate climate mitigation commitments faster than you can say, Donald Trump.
In January of this year, an assessment by the UK’s intelligence chiefs at MI5, M16 and its Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), forced out by a freedom of information request and only published in abridged form, stated that our national prosperity, social order, food security and more rely on ecosystems that are all on a “pathway to collapse”, if business continues as usual.
That did cause a minor ripple: a story on the BBC News website, a piece in the Guardian, a short clip on Channel 4. Meanwhile, Victoria Beckham’s wedding dance with son Brooklyn generated a media tsunami.
A month later, an ITV exclusive brilliantly shared extracts from the full, uncensored national security assessment, including the possibility of nuclear strikes over competition for shrinking glaciers, anthrax from melting permafrost causing mass mortalities, and nature loss costing twice as much as the last financial crash, among other omissions from the reader-friendly official pamphlet version.
Follow-ups? None. (But make sure YOU follow up: do watch and share the ITV explainer, public-service broadcasting at its best.)
And just over a week ago, another government report, this time from 2024 and commissioned by a since-disbanded Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) Futures team, came to light in a Times exclusive (following a FOI request by me) saying the UK’s food security was “at risk of catastrophic failure by 2030”.
By now, suppressed reports are coming out so thick and fast that you could be forgiven for thinking you’d already read it (indeed, whistle-blowing food industry executives said much the same thing about food security in a secret memo a year ago).
Add the voices of insurance companies, the Bank of England and the finance industry, and it’s clear to see that the cracks aren’t just showing, they are spreading. The whole system is creaking and groaning at the seams, and the US/Israel war with Iran has supercharged that.
Our dependence on oil is killing us in every which way, but that’s not even the story. It’s the fact that warnings and reports about systems collapse keep coming in, and that the mainstream media barely bother to cover them or follow up. Nor do markets seem to notice them.
Perhaps, at least, the UK Government is listening to its own public warnings? Well, the just-published Land Use Framework For England, the first of its kind, claims it will support food security and national resilience, “making a clear, long-term commitment to maintaining food production in England”. The words ‘ecosystem collapse’ and ‘biodiversity loss’ do not figure.
A dry single sentence: “The environmental, economic and social resilience of England depends on how well we use our land,” is the closest reference to the earlier Defra report. It seems we must learn to read between the cracks. Before the cracks become cracks in fields with abandoned crops: something we might see a lot of if we get a Super El Niño this time next year.
A briefing on national security by the National Emergency Briefing (NEB) in November 2025 brought together a range of experts in Westminster to present a clear-eyed view of how things stand now, and what we can still do about it. Since then, the publicizing of the suppressed Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) national security assessment and, in particular, the suppressed Defra Futures report has served as a de facto national emergency briefing via the media. But my point is that this has yet to land with nearly enough impact.
There is still a strong opportunity to get this whole message out when a film of the proceedings at the NEB is launched on 7 April. Communities across the country are coming together to host screenings, and MPs will be invited.
It’s a chance for us to do what most of the media, the markets, and the government have singularly failed to do.
Watch the film, but that is just the start. By coming together, sharing (and processing) our feelings and concerns, and agreeing on plans to take action, we can raise that vital collective awareness and begin to lay the foundations of real resilience in our own communities.
Because it looks like no one is coming to save us. We ourselves are the cavalry.
So watch and share the ITV explainer. And by gathering locally where we are across the country in the coming weeks and months, we can better land on the fact that, where the powers that be have failed, we are ourselves ready, as best we can, to step into the breach.
