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

**Caroline Lucas** (0:08)
What 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. Last 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 organizations, 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.
And 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. I 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 Nugee, and in the second half with former British diplomat and security expert Arthur Snell. So here's my interview with Richard Nugee.
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 defense, for the military. So can you explain how you came to that conclusion?

**Richard Nugee** (2:47)
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 heatstroke, 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. 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. What are we doing about being prepared for a world where the heat, climate change, is going to get worse? That's the first thing. 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. It'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 these areas. We 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.