“You can’t stop a flood or a shrivelled harvest by dropping a bomb on it.”
By Paul Atkin, Greener Jobs Alliance
If the first duty of government is to keep its people safe, the shelving this month of a report from parliament’s joint intelligence committee that describes the “destabilising impact of the climate and nature crises on national security” as one of the “biggest risks facing Britain” is a stunning dereliction of duty.
Particularly as, according to both the Times and the Guardian, the reason for the suppression is that the government is “unwilling to face the issues raised” because their cuts to foreign aid to pay for increased military spending, undermined the chances to “stabilise countries most at risk from the climate crisis and avoid some of the impacts”.
This ‘global ecosystem assessment report’, which looks at the consequences of the degradation and destruction of tropical and boreal forests, coral reefs and mangroves on the UK, warns that food shortages and economic disaster are potentially just years away, with impacts already being felt and growing as temperatures rise.
This compounds the local impacts of climate change on food production, which has already led to a shortfall of a quarter of the UK wheat harvest between 2020 and 2024.
Add to this the letter from the Climate Change Committee that UK planning should prepare for at least 2C of global heating by 2050, underlining that the country is “not yet adapted” to worsening weather extremes already occurring at current levels of warming, “let alone” what was expected to come, which builds on their report from April which said preparations in the UK for rising temperatures were “either too slow, has stalled, or [are] heading in the wrong direction”.
This will leave people throughout the country vulnerable to serious economic and health impacts, from hell and high water, on hospitals and care homes, food and water supplies; while impacts of high temperatures are already apparent, for example, in schools, with the Department for Education already reporting lost learning time due to heat.
It’s a statement of the bleeding obvious that none of this can be dealt with by increasing military spending, particularly not on the eye-watering scale that President Trump has demanded. In fact, in diverting expenditure from domestic green investment and the overseas aid needed for international security, and to pay our dues as a country that has released far more than its fair share of greenhouse gases since the 1750s, this malign diversion of funding is making us less safe. You can’t stop a flood or a shrivelled harvest by dropping a bomb on it. Trying to secure “national security” at the expense of the rest of the world can only lead to disaster. We make it through together, or none of us does.
Our campaigning in the trade union year of climate action will need to take all of this up.
- Paul Atkin is the editor of the GJA, you can follow them on Facebook and Twitter/X.
- This article was originally published by the Greener Jobs Alliance (GJA) November 2024 Newsletter – you can read the newsletter in full here.
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