We Need to Talk About Ecosystem Collapse

In January, the UK government quietly released a national security assessment on global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and the related threats to national and international security. Originally due out last October, its publication was reportedly delayed by Downing Street, but the unflinching reality of its findings has never felt more urgent.

Cascading Impacts of Ecological Collapse

In bleak brutal language, the report lays out the accelerating first-order impacts faced by UK security and prosperity as global ecosystem degradation speeds up and critical ecosystems collapse. These include crop failures, disease and natural disasters, all of which will intensify as important ecosystems reach critical thresholds and tip over into collapse.

Examples of this are already evident – the UK has suffered three of the five worst harvests in the last ten years; the World Meteorological Association estimates that natural disasters have increased fivefold in the last 50 years; and, well, Covid-19 taught us all a thing or two about pandemics.

But it doesn’t end there. Every critical ecosystem the UK depends upon is on a pathway to potentially irreversible collapse, once it passes critical thresholds. Some of these are estimated to arrive as soon as 2030. That is just four years away. And the UK is not alone. All countries are exposed to the risks of ecosystem collapse within and beyond their borders. Some will be exposed sooner than others and are likely to act to secure their interests, particularly water and food security.

The cascading risks caused by ecosystems collapsing twill likely include geopolitical instability, economic insecurity, conflict, migration and increased inter-state competition for resources. Anyone with even half an eye on the news cycle can confirm these dystopian trends are already part of our reality, but unless we take rapid action, they will intensify in truly dystopian ways.

Doing Nothing is Not an Option

On our current trajectory, without changing patterns of consumption or increasing efforts for energy transition, the report makes clear only bad things will happen.

Migration will rise exponentially as more people are pushed into poverty. Organised crime will exploit demand, leading to an increase in human trafficking and criminal monopolies over scarce resources. Outbreaks of disease and other biosecurity threats will increase as biodiversity declines and temperatures change, as well as the opportunities for state and non-state actors to exploit them. Food production will fail to meet our needs, the cost of living will rise exponentially, and economic insecurity will be more likely.

The assessment also observes how these impacts will make populations vulnerable to disinformation and political polarisation. This will be exploited by terrorist groups and other non-state actors, who will seek to capture resource-rich areas or jurisdictions. State threats will be amplified as individual countries act aggressively to mitigate their own risk. Geopolitical contestation will accelerate, as countries jostle for access to productive land, clean water, safe transit routes and critical minerals, and both inter- and intra-state military interventions will become increasingly likely.

Mainstreaming the Debate

Whilst the report is careful to caveat the levels of uncertainty involved in its analysis – the text stipulates that it is not a scientific report and uses confidence ratings for key statements – its findings do chime with wider climate and resilience scholarship, echoing and validating warnings from scientists which have long highlighted the UK’s security blind spot in the face of such irreversible ecological breakdown.

This intelligence risk rating approach signals another significant shift, as it gives a clue as to the report’s authorship. While the assessment has been published by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the document itself was reportedly produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee, reflecting the increased involvement of ‘traditional’ security actors in this important dialogue. Might this signal the start of an important doctrinal shift in how the Government frames environmental risk?

Certainly, this reframing of environmental concerns mirrors broader trends. NATO has long acknowledged the accelerating impacts of climate change on its operations and the mounting implications for allied security, establishing a dedicated Centre of Excellence for Climate Change and Security in May 2024. In civil society, non-environmental actors are also increasingly active in driving the debate: some of the most powerful contemporary research on the economic risks of ecological collapse has been driven by the insurance industry, like this report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries which warns of a 50% loss in global GDP between 2070 and 2090 if urgent action is not taken.

It seems climate and nature narratives finally have a seat at the big table, and not before time. Only this week, a local council in Wales was reported as having to spend £2.5 million to buy a single row of houses, in order to demolish them because they can no longer be protected from climate-related flooding. Extrapolate one street in Wales to all areas at risk of flooding in the UK, and that becomes a hard budget to balance.

You Are What You Eat

The report also drives home a key point about domestic food security. One of its most immediate recommendations is to strengthen UK food production, not just through support and innovation in the farming sector but also by effecting dramatic changes to consumer behaviour.

Based on current diets, which are heavily reliant on livestock farming, the UK’s food production sector cannot support its own population. In the event of an ecosystem collapse, global food prices would increase significantly, and entire markets or supply chains could implode, limiting the UK’s ability to import the food it needs to sustain its own population.

This suggests more wholesale changes are required – not just moving UK food production to greater self-sufficiency and exploring technical innovation in lab-generated or insect protein, but also in a more radical shift to plant-based diets, if we are to not go hungry. This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. While only 3% of the population currently practice veganism, 58% of Britons are reducing their intake of meat, and city financiers are building insect farms, suggesting a significant mindset shift is underway.

Nevertheless, this strategy will require substantive government and industry support to the farming community, including financial incentives to facilitate increased production of protein crops and innovations in alternative solutions. In addition to the benefits of increasing UK resilience to food system shocks, evidence suggests such a change would also lessen the burden on the NHS through reduced risk of heart disease and cancer.

Improving the resilience of the UK agriculture sector to ecological risks and integrating food production into security planning will lessen the risk of food insecurity taking hold in the UK and tipping over into broader security threats.

Reconciling Conflicting Policy Narratives

Where the major concerns may lie is in how this information has been buried beneath the weight of the day-to-day priorities of government and media, and no more so than during the current news cycle. Environmental problems have long been deprioritised due to their complexity and the slow, incremental rate of ecological change, passed over in favour of focusing on what are perceived as more immediate threats.

But what if these are just the symptoms, and not the root cause of what ails us? Reframing the current themes dominating the global agenda – from immigration to resource colonialism – under a deep time narrative of ecosystem collapse and climate change can help gain some long-term perspective. Through this lens, it might feel like we’ve been watching for the enemy from the wrong side of the fort.

This does not mean we should ignore aggressive acts by rogue states or pretend there are not unprecedented levels of global migration – far from it. But it does mean acknowledging how these poly-crises are all connected and using a whole-systems approach to determining the necessarily multi-faceted response.

For example, the swinging cuts to development funding may be logical in the face of Russian aggression in Europe and the steady US erosion of the NATO alliance, with the related need to bolster defence budgets. But such a linear view risks underestimating the complex dependencies between environmental and national security.

Relatedly, studies have shown how a 1% increase in food insecurity can trigger a near 2% rise in migration, so investing in programmes that promote food security in vulnerable jurisdictions can directly mitigate some of the security risks of concern in this report.

Government spending maybe just as finite a resource as our forests, land and rivers, so spending our way out of this mess is not a solution. But neither is taking an ostrich-like approach to the problem. Yet with no press fanfare or official commentary, this landmark report was quietly released on a day where the news cycle was dominated by Davos and the escalating row over Greenland.

Given the existential importance of its content, the delays and obfuscation suggests policymakers and politicians are themselves also struggling with reconciling this urgent threat with the government’s own commitment to economic growth and tendency to frame nature as the bad guy in their efforts to achieve this.

But if it turns out we cannot have economic growth and prevent nature from imploding at the same time, we need to have grown-up conversations about it. Anything less amounts to a mass experiment in cognitive dissonance.

© RUSI, 2026.

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