Environmental Audit Committee hears evidence on biodiversity loss and threats to national security

"National security is about the ability to choose the life we lead as a country. It’s absolutely right to say that if you have a continued climate change and biodiversity loss, it will affect the way that we can lead our lives and therefore it is right to say it’s a national security issue. I think the shift is not that we haven’t known about the ecological consequences of what is happening before, but to have put it into a security context, to have got intelligence analysts to produce this rather than environmental scientists to produce this, is a fundamental change. I would expect that it be taken seriously. This is not a report that can be dismissed easily."

Laurie Laybourn, Executive Director, Strategic Climate Risks Initiative and Associate Fellow, Chatham House: "The report signals the beginning of a new era: the climate and nature crisis has reached a severity that now fundamentally threatens national security. Yet government is set up to handle the old era, where threats to the nation came largely from hostile enemies, not a dangerously unstable environment. For example, which department 'owns' the threat of the collapse of the Atlantic circulation that gives the UK its temperate climate, the chances of which are spiraling? This means that many government policies seem to operate in a parallel universe—one that contradicts its own threat assessment—where rapid action isn't needed to guard against escalating threats to food supply, financial stability, and so on. Yet reality is colliding with that universe, and as the consequences become even more severe, people will ask why more wasn't done to prepare."

Gareth Redmond-King, Head of International at the Energy & Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU): "We already know climate change and the second fossil fuel crisis in five years are driving food prices up and food security down. But we also know national security officials have warned the UK government of much graver threats from growing risks of ecosystem collapse on the ability to feed ourselves. Alongside DEFRA warnings of ‘catastrophic failure’ of our food supply chains [3], and the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries’ assessment that the world’s food system is fracturing under the weight of climate change and biodiversity loss [4], it is deeply worrying that the UK Government appears still to be withholding the detail of this report from the British public.

"Six million people in the UK faced food insecurity at the start of this year already, and more than 90% of UK adults don’t get enough fruit and veg - commodities for which we are heavily reliant on imports from overseas. Yet the UK government continues to assert that “the UK has a resilient food system”. In the face of this, as well as what the Commons Environmental Audit Committee has been hearing about the wider national security threats from climate change, people will want to be assured that the government takes this seriously."