Nature degradation and UK national security: time for cross-government action
A new national security assessment by the UK government warns that global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse threaten the UK’s prosperity and security through food and other supply chains, and geopolitical instability. Maria Waaifoort argues that a cross-government approach is needed to manage the trade-offs between food security, affordability and resilience, and to align resilience investment, economic strategy and fiscal choices around a shared objective: reducing the likelihood and severity of future shocks.
Earlier this week, the UK government published a new assessment of global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse that puts nature degradation on the national security map. Commissioned by the Joint Intelligence Committee and led by the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), the assessment concludes that the collapse of vital global ecosystems – such as the Amazon and Congo Basin rainforests, and boreal forests – would have material spillovers for the UK, especially through threats to food security. With the UK importing 40% of its food (including 25% from Europe), the country’s food security is at risk when global scarcity drives geopolitical competition for food and water.
The assessment frames nature degradation not as a distant conservation concern but as a driver of cascading disruption across food, water and health supply chains, and as a source of geopolitical instability. This matters because many environmental debates still default to a climate-only lens, yet climate change and nature degradation are deeply interconnected. Treating them as separate in security and economic analysis leaves blind spots in risk assessments and policy design.
A pivotal assessment for economic policymakers
The national security assessment hits close to home for economic and financial policymakers. They are already grappling with conditions adjacent to food insecurity: food price volatility, supply chain disruptions and persistent inflation, including in climate-sensitive items in the UK food basket. Central banks around the world are producing research on how the degradation of key ecosystem services and climate shocks drive up food inflation (see this example in France). This echoes the national security assessment’s message that ecosystem degradation or collapse that affects major food-producing regions will drive up food prices.
The assessment also makes clear that acting to increase resilience for national security can involve near-term price trade-offs. The UK’s relatively heavy reliance on imports and limited self-sufficiency mean that shocks to ecosystems abroad and at home present challenges for price stability and resilience. The assessment states that the UK cannot be self-sufficient in food production while maintaining current prices and diets, and that full self-sufficiency would require substantial price increases for consumers, alongside dietary change and investment across the food system.
For national security planners, a focus on resilience requires a proactive agenda for securing supply chains and domestic capacity before shocks occur. This is especially true in the context of heightened trade tensions and geopolitical volatility, in which global scarcity drives state intervention and the securitisation of food supply chains. But for central banks and Ministries of Finance, higher food prices cut straight into household purchasing power and can complicate price and macroeconomic stability. They are often pulled in to respond to a shock: central banks through interventions focused on price stability, and Ministries of Finance through fiscal measures targeting cost-of-living pressures and wider economic effects. Such objectives interact with one another and can pull in different directions. This is why the UK government should respond to the national security assessment with a coordinated approach across policy lanes.
A cross-government resilience strategy
No single department can deliver on food system resilience alone. If the UK treats nature degradation as a national security risk, it will need a coordinated plan that links food security to affordability, trade, diplomacy and security planning. Defra has expertise in ecosystems and land use, but it does not make the macroeconomic and distributional choices that determine whether a resilience strategy is politically and economically viable. The Treasury, in turn, will be unable to manage the fiscal and distributional consequences of resilience measures if it is blind to the effects of proactive security-driven initiatives that could reshape food supply chains and affect prices.
An uncoordinated approach to food security, affordability and resilience would entrench incoherent policymaking that invites future crises. Therefore, the UK requires a centrally coordinated cross-government effort – which the Cabinet Office is best-placed to lead – and the committed support of senior leaders in specific departments: Defra on a resilient domestic food system; the Department for Business and Trade on resilient trading partnerships; the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office on engagement and resilience overseas; the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on the management of the trade-offs and synergies between nature action and climate mitigation; and the Treasury on ensuring the UK’s fiscal framework and spending decisions support delivery. This coordinated effort would force policy workstreams that currently run in parallel to confront their interdependence and align around a shared goal.
For the Treasury and the Bank of England, the point is not only to react when food shocks hit but to help build a shared understanding of the economic and financial implications of resilience policies. Early engagement with the new national security assessment would help ensure that analysis on inflation, output, employment and financial stability informs the Government’s decisions as it defines what resilience means in practice and the trade-offs it is willing to manage. Once the direction of travel is set, that same analysis would help the Treasury and the Bank of England prepare for the stabilisation challenges that may arise from not just physical climate- and nature-related shocks but also policy-driven adjustments.
In this context, economic and financial policymakers require stronger analytical capabilities to guide the transition to halt and reverse nature degradation. While capabilities on nature-related risks are growing, the transition toolkit is still more developed for the net-zero and energy transition. The equivalent for nature degradation is more nascent, even though the transformation of the food system is central to halting and reversing it. This matters because such a transformation of food systems will create friction. New research suggests that a transformation to a resilient food system in Europe could reprice assets across various areas of agriculture and supply chains, creating vulnerabilities for farmers that could have cascading effects. The earlier that central banks analyse such challenges, the more likely they are to help governments anticipate where targeted support will be needed to prevent predictable resistance and distributional effects from leading to delays or inaction that ultimately increase risks and costs.
UK strategy and coordinated resilience planning on nature
The assessment’s core message is that early action is cheaper than a late crisis response. It emphasises that “protecting and restoring ecosystems is easier, cheaper and more reliable” than relying on uncertain technologies in the wake of a major disruption. In the context of the food system, it frames ecosystem protection and nature restoration as an important part of resilience-building, alongside innovation and investment that would help the UK adapt to a more volatile global environment.
A cross-government resilience strategy will only be credible if it is backed by long-term resourcing decisions – in which the Treasury is pivotal. For the Treasury, acting now to protect and restore ecosystems is a budgeting and strategy issue as much as an environmental one. If nature degradation is treated as a national security risk, spending that reduces exposure at home and through overseas supply chains should be viewed as an investment in risk reduction and security, not an environmental expense.
The national security assessment states that ecosystem degradation can drive scarcity, higher global food prices and market disruption in ways that feed directly into household food insecurity and wider economic instability. Therefore, the assessment strengthens the case for aligning resilience investment, economic strategy and fiscal choices around a shared objective: reducing the likelihood and severity of future shocks. The UK already has a National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plan (NBSAP) for 2030; this logic should encourage the Treasury to treat that strategy as a risk-reduction programme that helps the UK fulfil its commitments under the Global Biodiversity Framework.
The assessment also raises the bar for how the Government thinks about its pledges on international climate finance (ICF) and official development assistance (ODA), by concluding that the country’s food security and economic stability depend on vital ecosystems overseas, and that local events harm those ecosystems. That conclusion creates a direct rationale for international spending as a form of domestic risk reduction. The UK has committed to spend £11.6bn on ICF between the fiscal years 2021–22 and 2025–26, including at least £3bn on protecting and restoring nature. However, the decision to cut ODA from 0.5% to 0.3% of gross national income from 2027 puts this funding under pressure. In light of the new national security assessment, future nature and climate finance becomes more than solidarity or diplomacy. It is a way to manage drivers of insecurity, instability and price shocks that can directly impact UK households. Coordinated action can give decision-makers a clearer line of sight between international nature investment and efforts to improve domestic resilience.
It is easy for an assessment such as this to be crowded out by more immediate crises. However, it cements the fact that nature degradation is a risk multiplier that compounds existing challenges. For the UK and indeed all advanced economies that still view nature-related risks as peripheral, it should serve as a reminder: in a world of multiplying and compounding crises, resilience requires cross-government action.
The author would like to thank Daisy Jameson, Elena Almeida, Sini Matikainen, Chris Raggett and Georgina Kyriacou for reviewing an earlier draft of this commentary.