The Secret Security Threat The Government Don’t Want Us To Know

0:07What if the biggest threat to UK national security isn't conventional warfare, it isn't a hostile state or a terrorist network, but rather the collapse of the natural world itself? What if the government knew yet tried to make sure that we never found out? Welcome to When Nature Becomes a Security Threat. I'm Caroline Lucas. In this series, I'm exploring the latest assessments about how nature loss and the climate crisis will make Britain less safe, and why these grave warnings are now coming not just from the environmental movement, but from the very top of our national security establishment.

0:44Last year, a report was commissioned by the government and compiled by the UK's most senior intelligence body, the Joint Intelligence Committee. That includes the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, all in one room. Now, these are the people who advise the government about the greatest threats the country faces, and usually they're warning about state threats, espionage, terrorist organisations or cyber threats. But this report was different. It told us definitively that nature loss and climate breakdown is equally considered to be a core national security threat, and that multiple interconnected ecosystem breakdowns are not just possible, they're increasingly likely.

1:24and the consequences for the UK would be profound. So the report was commissioned, it was compiled and it was due to be released in October last year. The King was apparently lined up to give a speech and journalists waited in keen anticipation. But then, without warning, the launch was cancelled. The report was buried and it very nearly never saw the light of day. And in fact, it's only thanks to persistent freedom of information requests from Ruth Chambers at the Green Alliance think tank that ministers did finally release a version. A version which was truncated, redacted and without explanation.

2:01I have never read an official report that has alarmed me as much as this one. That a report of this nature is coming from the security services is something new. In this first episode, I'll be speaking with former senior British Army officer, Lieutenant General Richard Nuge, and in the second half with former British diplomat and security expert Arthur Snell. So here's my interview with Richard Nuge. So Richard, you're someone who's spent over 35 years in the army and perhaps you're not the kind of person we would necessarily expect to now be such a passionate advocate for treating climate change and biodiversity loss as a really important issue for security, for defence, for the military.

2:44So can you explain how you came to that conclusion? Yes, I came to that conclusion from two very, very clear things. I commanded a battle group of 1 ,000 soldiers in Iraq in 2003. Nobody was lost through enemy action. But I had one person die of a heart attack due to heat. I had five people I had to send home with heat stroke. And we used 250 saline drips to keep people cool because we had no air conditioning. The intensity of the heat we were utterly unprepared for. And that started to make me think, well, actually, the biggest killer for my battle group, not for others, but for my battle group was actually the heat.

3:22What are we doing about being prepared for a world where the heat, climate change, is going to get worse? That's the first thing. And the second thing is that if you have a scarcity of resources, and heat produces a scarcity of water, and heat produces a scarcity of food, because if you don't have the water, you don't have the irrigation, you don't have the food, then you end up with competition over those resources. And there are lots of examples of non-state actors, as they're called, terrorist organizations, however you want to describe them, weaponizing food, weaponizing water to gain power.

4:03It's not about weaponizing food for the sake of food. It is to gain power. So you end up with ISIS in Iraq, Boko Haram in Nigeria, Al-Shabaab in Somalia, areas where we as a country have a view and have an influence to a greater or lesser extent. where these non-state actor movements actually employ the farmers because the farmers can't farm because the agriculture has failed because of climate change. And it becomes a way of destabilizing the governments. So allies of ours are having their governments potentially destabilized because of competition for food. That should matter to a soldier who has to go and fight in those areas.

4:49We had soldiers in Mali. We had soldiers in Kenya. We had soldiers in Somalia. We had soldiers, obviously, in Iraq. And yet some of what we were fighting was because farmers wanted to put some bread on the table of their families. And it looks as if your military colleagues have now been persuaded, your security colleagues, because we do now have this report from the Joint Intelligence Committee. And it does indeed say that we could have real global competition for food as soon as the 2030s. They warned of increased competition over resources, including arable land, water, safe transit routes.

5:25And they link it very specifically to the rising likelihood of conflict between and within states. So I wonder what your response was when you read that report, and also when you heard that, in fact, this was a redacted version, and there is an unredacted version, which by all accounts is even more shocking. So the first thing is, I think it is a seminal report. And the reason it is seminal, a lot of what is in the report is probably not new to those who are from a deeply environmental background. But what is new is two things. The first is that the government has, for the first time outside defence, and it goes back to my earlier comments about national security being more than just defence, first time that the government has linked national security and nature collapse and biodiversity loss.

6:15That is really important that they have made that intellectual leap and that now they believe, if this report is believed by government, they now believe that biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation is a threat to our national security. So it is a seminal moment. The second reason it's seminal is because it hasn't been produced by the vested interests of the environmental movement or even the vested interests of defence. And I am well aware that people turn around and say that defence would securitise everything because it gives them more money. There's an impression, having been sort of close to the top of defence, I would dispute that, but that's an impression given.

6:57So now we have the senior intelligence analysts in the country, so they don't have a vested interest. They just want to produce the intelligence, turning around and saying, this is a major problem coming down the road to us. That's why it's a seminal report. You said, I think, if the government is to be believed, they are taking this seriously too. But of course, we just don't know that, do we? Because they tried to suppress the report. And so my question to you is, why do you think they tried to do that? I could take a rational view and I could take an irrational view. The rational view is that almost no Joint Intelligence Committee reports, almost no senior intelligence analyst reports that go to the National Security Council are released for public knowledge.

7:41They are purposefully restricted in their output because it is government making decisions on really high level intelligence. And it's worth noting that this report had, even in the redacted version, had high confidence in most of its conclusions. So this is the intelligence analysts putting, you know, intelligence analysts are, if you like, notoriously risk averse. They want to put what they genuinely believe or can prove in front of the audience. And they try not to say something is high confidence because that leaves them little wiggle room. They have done so with this report. So the rational behind me turns around and says, there's a completely logical piece to this, which is it went to the National Security Council.

8:27How many other National Security Council reports have we seen? And the answer is very few. The irrational was, and this has certainly been put about in the press, is that actually it is so shocking that the government didn't want the public to know. Why is that irrational? Because I think it denies the fact that almost no reports that come out of this intelligence committee actually get into the public domain. You say that, but I was really struck by something that I read, which was that there was a big launch planned of this report. So the intention was that this report was going to be made public.

9:03In fact, I've heard, I don't know if it's true, but I've heard that the king was on standby to come along and launch this report. So it was going to be made public, and then it wasn't, which I think in some ways pushes back a bit on the idea that none of these reports ever get published anyway, so why are we making such a fuss? And so I would turn around and say that that may well be true. I don't know, I hadn't heard that. That may well be true. But I think if you actually read the redacted version, that is shocking enough in its own right. And therefore, The fact that there's inevitably more detail in the unexplicated version, and I have heard, I haven't actually read it, I have not been allowed to, but I have heard various comments about it.

9:43And one of them is that, and if you like, one of the most frightening elements of it is that nuclear powers, and they particularly mean China, Russia, and Pakistan, may well be competing for food and for water in the area up in Kashmir where they are all closely geographically placed. and that the breakdown of ecosystems and the breakdown of environmental conditions would potentially, and it's put as, I'm told, a very sort of tentative, it could lead to nuclear war. That's the implication of it. That is very frightening, but I don't think we need that level of fear to really, if we really understand what this report says, every critical ecosystem is on the pathway to destruction, which is what the report says, I mean, I've got the words exactly right, that's basically what it says, that is terrifying.

10:37It should be terrifying in its own right. We don't need a sort of nuclear war ogre to make it more terrifying than actually, we must do something about this ecosystem collapse. Because if we don't, then we, and it makes this very explicit, we may not be able to feed ourselves as a country. So to help unpack the wider geopolitical fallout from climate breakdown and nature loss, I'm joined now by Arthur Snell, a former diplomat and security expert with over 30 years experience in conflict zones and fragile states, including Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. He's an associate fellow of RUSI, the Royal United Services Institute, a former British ambassador, and the author, I have to say, of a really brilliant new book, Elemental, the new geography of climate change and how we survive it.

11:24So, Arthur, welcome. Thank you. I wonder if you could start by sharing your perspective on the relationship between climate and nature breakdown on one hand and national security in the other. Because I was really struck in your book how you challenge the kind of oversimplistic analysis that might suggest that certain wars were caused by an overheating planet, but at the same time, you make the case that climate is always there, acting as a catalyst or an amplifier of risk. Yeah, well, Caroline, I think you've used that word perfectly, catalyst. And that was really how I alighted on this after researching this for some time and working on the book, that if we think about, you know, our sort of science lessons at school, a catalyst isn't part of a chemical reaction, but it's something that makes it more intense, perhaps more powerful.

12:08And in that sense, it seems to me that this is quite a good analogy for what the climate is doing. There are wars and conflicts. There are instability situations across the world. It would be odd and probably slightly dishonest to say that they're solely caused by the climate crisis. But we can see the role of climate making these things much more intense. And there are lots of case studies of that. Can you give us a couple? Sure. Yeah. I mean, I think one that we've probably all heard a bit about is the Arab Spring. And a quite influential paper was written which proposed that the Arab Spring had been as a result of climate change.

12:43And again, that's far too simplistic. It wasn't climate change that forced dictators across the Arab world to mistreat people and to oppress those people that then sort of boiled over into protests and so on. But let's think about the triggering event of the original Arab Spring in Tunisia, the young man who's selling vegetables in a market and had his stool sort of smashed up by the police. Well, why was he doing this? Partly because it was a desperately poor part of central Tunisia where people involved in farming had struggled with rising food prices, struggled with unemployment. Similarly, in Syria, where, of course, the Arab Spring really took off in a big way and turned into a very devastating civil war, as everyone knows.

13:28There, decades of shifting climate forced people out of rural areas into cities, increasing all kinds of tensions and difficulties within the societies. So that's two good examples where we can see that climate's playing a big role. But of course, it's not the only factor. You paint a very vivid picture in your book of a world in flux of climate breakdown driving global instability, superpowers forced to confront new vulnerabilities, other countries suddenly finding their natural resources unexpectedly in demand from habitable land to critical minerals. The pace of change is what's putting real pressure on what remains of the rules-based international order.

14:08I think you've called this a new age of empire. I I wonder if you could unpack a bit more about what you mean by that. As the rules-based international order breaks down, at the same time, we're seeing, because of the climate, increased flux, certainly in terms of population dynamics, but also geography itself. So one of the biggest changes probably in the 2030s will be the ice-free Arctic in the summer. So one of the areas of the planet, which used to have a fairly settled idea of geopolitical space was the Arctic. It was literally and metaphorically frozen. Whereas if you see it unfrozen, then that becomes a zone of contestation.

14:50Does an imperial America seize control of Greenland? Does Russia pursue its claim? It has made very expansive claims to most of the territory of the ocean that leads to the North Pole. So there are things like that where the climate is shifting geography, but of course it's also shifting the way that the whole basis of economies. So the energy transition, obviously, from reliance on hydrocarbon energy, largely to renewable energy, the electrification, that is a profound shift in terms of where power sits in the world. At the moment, it sits with countries that have access and can control hydrocarbons.

15:29Well, that shift will go to particularly China that has kind of led the race in the energy transition. I mean, it's interesting talking about Trump and climate denialism because in a way it kind of sums up a real trend that we're seeing across the world whereby populists and populist parties are really weaponizing climate action. Until recently, populists have been traditionally more focused on issues of migration and culture wars. And yet now climate change and climate action has been added to their list of grievances. And I wonder what you think it is about climate action and climate policy that's made it so open to that kind of capture.

16:07Yeah, it's certainly something that I came across when I was working on the book and you see it in lots of countries. So this isn't just in the US or clearly it's happening in the UK. Nigel Farage is quite often adopt sort of climate skeptic or sometimes sort of fringe, you know, flirts with denialism. Yes, why do populists do this? I think partly because the climate crisis, whilst in some respects, it's visceral, It's something we can see if we see an extreme weather event, the aftermath or something. But in many cases, it's the opposite. It's something that's mediated by experts. We can't see how many parts per million of CO2 there are.

16:42We're just being told that. And sometimes these experts are telling us that we've got to change the way we live our lives in ways that might be more expensive or less convenient, whether it's cutting down on certain types of food or short-haul air travel or whatever. And so I think whilst I wouldn't argue that it's of necessity that that's how the climate crisis is communicated, there has been a tendency to do it that way. And that gives populists an easy target. These people who don't live lives like you, they don't understand your life, and they're telling you that you've got to redo the central heating in your house for thousands of pounds.

17:20And it's just this sort of endless grinding sense that some anonymous, invisible group of experts has sort of set out to ruin your life. So I think populists lean into that. But of course, the other thing, which is perhaps slightly more profound, is that as far as I understand it, populism is about fear. It's about taking people's fears and turning that into a political response. And it seems to me that the climate crisis is very useful because it is scary. The planet is changing profoundly in ways that we don't really understand. And it may trigger or contribute to a variety of other fearful things like millions of people moving or certain places in the world not being habitable that were before.

18:02So all these things are fearful. And of course, that's a big opportunity for populist politicians. There is so much more that I'm going to be covering in this series. We're going to be looking at food security, at issues around water scarcity and about the myths really behind the headlines to do with climate migration. So don't miss it. Please sign up at the rest is politics dot com.