UK intelligence chiefs produced an assessment concluding that biodiversity collapse is a direct national security threat. The government tried to suppress the report. It was obtained through FOI.

The key finding: every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to irreversible collapse. The consequences they identify are not environmental abstractions — they are food shortages, commodity price spikes, mass migration, novel diseases, and geopolitical instability.

What is interesting is not the finding itself. Ecologists have said this for years. What is interesting is that intelligence agencies are now framing it in security terms — and the government still tried to bury it.

The gap between what security institutions know and what policy reflects tells you something about how complex threats get handled. If the threat does not fit neatly into existing response frameworks — military, economic, diplomatic — it gets acknowledged in classified reports and ignored in budgets. The intelligence is there. The institutional capacity to act on it is not.