Secret Squirrel: biodiversity loss is a national security risk

This blog was written by Natasha Jackson

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With notably little fanfare, Defra last week published a short but striking document: a National Security Assessment of global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse.

The assessment, which is understood [see here] to have been produced by the Joint Intelligence Committee, applies the uncertainty framework used in intelligence assessments to reflect the probability of an event occurring and the level of analytical confidence in the judgments made.

It draws on a range of sources and scientific reports to appraise the “reasonable worst-case scenario” to conclude that the threat to UK national security is “high”.

Assessment of risk level

The assessment’s central proposition is blunt: severe degradation or collapse of critical ecosystems threatens UK national security.

It assesses that such a collapse would drive “cascading risks”, defined as risks that occur when an adverse impact triggers or amplifies other risks, and concludes that the following national security risks from ecosystem collapse are “highly likely”:

• Migration will rise as development gains begin to reverse and more people are pushed into poverty and into food and water insecurity. A 1% increase in food insecurity in a population leads to 1.9% more people migrating.
• Serious and Organised Crime will look to exploit and gain control over scarce resources. More people pushed into poverty will mean more opportunities for SOC to exploit (e.g. people trafficking and black markets in scarce food, pharmaceuticals, and critical minerals).
• Non-state actors (including terrorist groups) will have more opportunities resulting from political instability. They may gain control over scarce resources.
• State threats become more severe as some states become more exposed than others to food and water insecurity risks.
• Pandemic risk will increase as biodiversity degrades, people move between countries and the transfer of novel diseases between species becomes more likely.
• Economic insecurity becomes more likely. Nature is a finite asset which underpins the global economy. HMG assess that it would take the resources of 1.6 Earths to sustain the world’s current levels of consumption. The total annual value of ecosystem services to the UK was £87 billion in 2022 (3% of GDP). Geopolitical competition will increase as countries compete for scarce resources, including arable land, productive waters, safe transit routes, and critical minerals.
• Political polarisation and instability will grow in food and water-insecure areas, and as populations become more vulnerable to natural disasters. Disinformation will increase.
• Conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources. Existing conflicts will be exacerbated.

On timing, the assessment applies the intelligence framework to conservatively assign low confidence to any precise prediction of pathways and timeframes. But it does make an arresting judgment that there is a “realistic possibility” that some ecosystems (including SE Asian coral reefs and boreal forests) will start to collapse from 2030, and others (including rainforests and mangroves) from 2050.

Risk to the UK

The assessment emphasises UK exposure through food and fertiliser dependency. The UK imports 40% of its food and is heavily reliant on imports for certain categories (fresh produce, sugar, animal feed, palm oil) and fertiliser components. The assessment warns that without “significant increases” in resilience, it is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.

It also notes that protecting and restoring ecosystems is “easier, cheaper and more reliable” than relying on yet-to-scale technological solutions, although potential roles for innovation – from plant breeding to regenerative agriculture and emerging proteins – are acknowledged.

Implications: some thoughts

At COP26 in 2021, countries committed to ending and reversing deforestation by 2030. This was followed in 2023 by the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which aimed to eliminate the destruction of biodiverse areas (including forests) and ensure that at least 30% of degraded ecosystems are restored by 2030 (see Charles Bishop’s blog discussion of the UK’s plan for improving biosecurity here.

It is now 2026 and, both internationally and domestically, we are comfortably off track to achieve the ‘30by30’ goal. The OEP’s recent (Jan 2026) “Progress in improving the natural environment in England 2024/2025” report, which reflects on the goals set out in the UK’s Environmental Improvement Plan (published December last year), assessed the UK’s prospects of meeting the 30by30 target as “largely off track” (table 10.1) and set out a number of recommendations for enhancing biosecurity.

The publication of this national security assessment is interesting for a variety of reasons:

1. From the perspective of public law decision-making, the assessment frames biodiversity decline as a systems-risk problem rather than as a discrete conservation issue. This indirectly lends support to the argument that biodiversity decline is not merely a statutory target problem but a cross-cutting risk that decision-makers should rationally confront.
2. The assessment could be relevant to challenges concerning overly narrow decision-making that treats biodiversity impacts as localised, even though the government’s own position recognises global cascading effects.
3. In light of the assessment, NGOs (including the NGO, Forest Coalition) have called on the UK government to implement Schedule 17 of the Environment Act 2021 to ban the use of commodities grown on illegally deforested land, and to go further by ending imports of commodities grown on all deforested land. Similarly, the Chief Scientific Officer at WWF-UK wrote to the Guardian criticising the Government for failing to invest in a new international mechanism launched at COP30, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, and to end investments driving ecosystem loss, or to legislate to prohibit imports driving deforestation.
4. At a domestic level, the emphasis on ecosystem protection and resilience in the assessment sits somewhat uneasily with recent legislative and policy developments favouring rapid development over biodiversity and habitat protection (e.g. the Planning and Infrastructure Act; we have discussed this elsewhere on the blog. It remains to be seen if and how these forcefully articulated national security concerns compound domestic 30by30 obligations and OEP recommendations in the face of competing government priorities.

Finally, although not directly connected to this assessment, this (unusually) is not the only national security and environmental overlap in the news this week. You may have seen media reporting on an intended legal challenge to plans for a new Chinese embassy near the Tower of London, following a letter from the head of MI5 setting out that the national security risk posed by the embassy can be “managed”. Although it remains to be seen whether this challenge will be pursued and, if so, whether biodiversity/environmental protection grounds are raised, it is sufficiently rare for a planning challenge to give rise to national security concerns that this is well worth the shout out!