Biodiversity as a Security Risk
With cost of living pressures and a multi-country shift to right wing politics, sustainability efforts have been downgraded in a lot of places. Day-to-day dramas that will be forgotten in a year dominate the news cycle. But it doesn’t change conditions on the ground. Our life-support systems are still failing, we’ve still blown past seven of nine planetary boundaries. Organisations that ignore this and focus only on the next one or two quarters will not survive.
With this in mind, I posted the following to Linked In.
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'If current rates of biodiversity loss continue, every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse.'
So says this report on ecosystem collapse and its implications for near-term national security. It's not published by an environmental lobby group, but by the UK government's Joint Intelligence Committee and DEFRA. It came out a few days ago, after previously being suppressed for being too negative, and even then only the abridged version was released.
Risks include:
- Migration due to food and water insecurity
- Serious and organised crime and non-state actors gaining control over scarce resources
- State threats as some states are more exposed to food and water insecurity
- Pandemics due to more interaction with novel diseases in the wild
- Economic insecurity since 'Nature is a finite asset which underpins the global economy'
- Geopolitical competition for arable land, productive waters, safe transit routes and critical minerals
- Political polarisation and instability as disinformation channels try to blame someone
- Conflict and military escalation over arable land, food, water and resources.
This may be a British report, but the implications are global and we all need to do what we can to reverse the trend.
In the urban development space, this means looking beyond traditional metrics and incorporating nature into every project because every little bit counts. This shift from business-as-usual to nature-positive is a huge challenge in the industry, but it's no longer a nice-to-have; it's risk management and it's national security.
How are you and your teams staying ahead of the curve to enhance biodiversity on projects?
