Climate change is now a national security threat – ministers must act

For the first time ever, the British military has warned the government that climate change and the damage we have done to nature seriously threaten our national security.

These are not tree-hugging environmental campaigners, but top-level, hard-bitten military men carrying out their official duty of telling the truth to power.

Their report so frightened government ministers, and showed them to be so unprepared, that they banned its publication. Instead, the public was only allowed a pared-down version, with all the stark reality removed.

That tactic also suited the opposition. Normally, the Tories would be carrying out a relentless campaign to get the full truth. However, that would undermine their current downplaying of climate disruption, so they have been largely silent.

It’s only through leaks that we electors have learned the truth. The men and women we rely on to defend us believe that our homeland is under real threat. They say that we may well not be able to feed our people; that our GDP could be hit twice as hard as it was in the financial crisis; and that a Himalayan water shortage could trigger nuclear engagement between China, Pakistan and India. They also point to the increasing pressure of migrants moving across the world as their own countries become too hot to be habitable or to produce the food they need. They even warn that the warming of the permafrost could release dangerous pathogens, including anthrax.

Now, this isn’t the military seeking more resources for themselves. It is a clear statement that, unless we take action on protecting nature, conserving water, increasing home food production and countering climate change, our homeland is not safe, nor can it be defended.

Ministers have sought to dismiss the military fears as “worst-case scenarios“, and they talk up their increased spending on flood prevention and regenerative agriculture. Yet we have to act to prevent the worst-case scenario if we are to reduce the threat to a level with which we can cope. It is climate change that sets the timetable for that action. Pretending we have the time to move at a more gentle pace is just wishful thinking. We need the force of this military assessment to jerk us back into reality.

And that assessment centres on the likelihood that we will not be able to feed our people. Today, as we look out over the parched fields of England and prepare for yet another heatwave, the scale of the problem is all too evident. It took just three days of unaccustomed heat to cut UK milk production by 11 per cent. Last week, water shortages halted Britain’s biggest chicken-processing factory, which could only get started again by trucking in water by road. With no rain for more than a month, farmers warn of significantly reduced yields and widespread shortages of feed for livestock. In Britain’s breadbasket, the East of England, the wheat harvest may well be halved.

All this cannot be dismissed as one bad year. Climate risk has become a present reality. This is now the British climate – torrential downpours in winter and heatwaves in summer. We are almost entirely unprepared for this change. Indeed, funding to enable farmers to adapt has been slashed by both the government and the private sector. The independent experts – the Climate Change Committee – have warned that, at this rate, the UK’s high-quality productive land area will fall from 40 per cent to just over 10 per cent by 2050 because we are simply not making the investment necessary to cope with our changed climate.

And there’s nowhere else in the world from which we can make up the deficit in food production. What’s happening here is happening everywhere – indeed, we are more fortunate than most. Wildfires from Spain to Canada and China are destroying crops on a vast scale. Goldman Sachs says that, over the next two years, food shortages will push prices up by 16 per cent. It is likely that rice yields will fall by about 20 per cent, hit by the heat and water shortage.

Prolonged high temperatures will mean that whole areas of Africa, Asia and South America will become unproductive, and their peoples will have to look elsewhere for food. Britain, which now has to import nearly half of its food, will be particularly exposed, and that fundamentally undermines our national security.

The military rightly emphasise that we need soldiers, ships and drones if we are to defend ourselves. But they also make clear that, if we cannot feed our people, those defences will be to no avail.

Yet, unlike so many others, Britain can turn this around. We have the water we need and, if we invest now, we can get it to the places where it is needed. Properly supported, with access to advanced technology, our farmers can become much more productive. If we refuse to listen to the voices of complacency and fix our sights on stopping runaway climate change by 2050, we can make our nation more secure and help the world to avoid catastrophe.

Lord Deben was chairman of the Climate Change Committee