I know it’s almost impossible to turn your eyes away from the Trump show, but that’s the point. His antics, ever-grosser and more preposterous, are designed to keep him in our minds, to crowd out other issues. His insatiable craving for attention is a global-threat multiplier. You can’t help wondering whether there’s anything he wouldn’t do to dominate the headlines.
But we must tear ourselves away from the spectacle, for there are other threats just as critical that also require our attention. Just because you’re not hearing about them doesn’t mean they’ve gone away.
Why are they not salient? Partly because countries – and not just Trump’s – seem determined to keep us in the dark. The most important document published by the UK government since the general election emerged last week only through a freedom of information request. The national security assessment on biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse was supposed to have been published in October 2025, but the apparatchiks in Downing Street sought to make it disappear. Apparently there were two reasons: because its conclusions were “too negative”, and because it would draw attention to the government’s failure to act.
When the report at last appeared, thanks to an FoI request lodged by the Green Alliance, The Times reported that it had been significantly “abridged”, I expect by the same goons. Some of its starkest conclusions had been omitted. Even so, the assessment – believed to have been compiled by the joint intelligence committee (on which the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ sit) – is not exactly reassuring.
It echoes warnings some of us have made for years, only to be dismissed as nutters, doomsayers and extremists. It tells us that “ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).” This presents a threat to “UK national security and prosperity”. It says “the world is already experiencing impacts including crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks. Threats will increase with degradation and intensify with collapse.” The results will include geopolitical and economic instability, increased conflict and competition for resources. “It is unlikely the UK would be able to maintain food security if ecosystem collapse drives geopolitical competition for food.” It also warns that “conflict and military escalation will become more likely, both within and between states, as groups compete for arable land and food and water resources”.
It provides a powerful vindication of certain messages that, when voiced by environmentalists, have been greeted with hatred, fury and denial. For example, it tells us that “food production is the most significant cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss”, that “animal farming at current levels is unsustainable without imports” and that “the UK does not have enough land to feed its population and rear livestock: a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required”. I’d be lying if I wrote: “I hate to say, ‘We told you so.’” After years of insults and abuse, I say it with pride.
But what was cut from the report is, according to The Times, even graver, including a warning that the shrinkage of glaciers in the Himalayas, causing declining river flow, would “almost certainly escalate tensions” between China, India and Pakistan, leading to the possibility of nuclear war. Again, some of us have been trying to persuade governments to focus on this threat with little success.
It’s almost reassuring to know we’re not alone in being stonewalled. If even the security services are gagged when they tell the government what it doesn’t want to hear, perhaps our communication style, or our modes of protest or our dress sense, are not, as we keep being told, the problem. The report, notably shorter than most of its kind, gives every appearance of having been hastily and crudely truncated.
I wonder whether the full assessment might also have named some other pressing security threats. One is the way in which fossil fuel, meat and livestock producers have been funding far-right movements, to stifle environmental protection measures that would reduce their profits. Such funding is a major driver of the fascistic politics that we now witness in the US.
It’s not hard to see how inconvenient this report is for Starmer’s government, which has repeatedly sought to invent a conflict between prosperity and environmental protection. Its war on the living world (a world it reduces, according to the “cauldron principle”, to bats, newts, spiders and snails) is a major element of its appeal to the “hero voters” on which it believes its success depends. Never mind that these voters might not actually exist: we’ll bring our ghost army back from Reform UK by attacking wildlife, which everyone in Britain famously hates. That’s bound to work. So when the security services say that environmental protection is in fact essential to prosperity, their report must be suppressed.
Against the assessment’s advice that tropical forest ecosystems are crucial to the UK’s security, our government has decided so far not to invest one penny in the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, despite helping to establish this global funding mechanism. But rest assured: it tells us it’s “incredibly supportive” of the initiative. It seems determined to dump the international climate finance programme that the Tories established – to help poorer countries protect themselves and halt the collapse of ecosystems – when the current fund expires this year. Let’s ignore not just those eco-loons but the former military leaders arguing that climate finance is an essential element of national security.
At home, the government appears to have quietly given up on the target set by the Conservatives of “30x30”, which means 30% of our land and sea protected for nature by 2030. The national security assessment lists this as one of the essential measures needed to avert catastrophe. Labour’s new target? 30xnever.
And, as the Office for Environmental Protection points out, Starmer’s government is on track to miss even the dismal, risible targets for protecting and restoring wildlife established in the 2021 Environment Act, when George Eustice was environment secretary. Yes, the situation is actually worse than in the darkest days of Tory rule.
I know this government exists only to disappoint us. But its environmental failures are even more striking than its failures on other issues. When the ruling party compares unfavourably with the one that brought us Boris Johnson and Liz Truss, it’s worse than a betrayal. It’s a threat to our survival.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
