Comment Central
In an article for Comment Central, SCRI's Laurie Laybourn analyses the UK government's assessment on ecosystem collapse and discusses how national security frameworks must adapt to manage systemic environmental risks.
The government has still not set out its response to the assessment’s findings. A paradigm shift in the scale and prioritisation of environmental action would be needed, both at home and abroad. Yet the government is scaling back its support to protect and restore nature in ecosystem close to collapse. Many governments worldwide are doing something similar.
This is partly because they are not set up for an era of environmental collapse. Environmental issues are fragmented – climate change in the energy ministry, nature in environment department – yet the threats to security result from their interrelation. In turn, the environmental crisis has been considered a slowly evolving, long term problem, down the priority list, far below the threats posed by war and pandemics. Yet as the assessment shows, environmental collapse is emerging as an equally potent threat to security and can be a factor driving other, more traditional concerns, like conflict.
