When Nature Becomes a Security Threat

In March 2024, the heads of MI5 and MI6, the United Kingdom’s domestic and foreign intelligence services, publicly classified biodiversity loss as a national security risk.¹ The statement was delivered without the hedging language that typically characterizes intelligence community communications on emerging threats. Biodiversity loss, they said, posed a direct and growing risk to the stability of food systems, water supplies, and social order, both within the United Kingdom and across the regions where British security interests are engaged.

The announcement was not the result of a sudden discovery. The intelligence community’s assessment drew on more than a decade of classified and unclassified analysis linking ecological degradation to conflict, migration, state fragility, and economic disruption. What made the statement significant was not its content but its source. Intelligence agencies deal in threats. When they classify something as a security risk, they are not making an environmental argument. They are making a strategic one: this will destabilize governments, generate conflict, displace populations, and threaten the interests of our nation. Act accordingly.

The United Kingdom is not alone in this assessment. The United States, Australia, Germany, and several other NATO allies have reached similar conclusions through their own analytical processes. The difference is that most have not said so publicly, or have framed the issue in terms of climate change rather than biodiversity loss specifically. The UK assessment is notable because it names the ecological crisis directly, identifying the collapse of natural systems, not just rising temperatures, as a vector for instability.

The Pentagon’s decade of warnings

The U.S. Department of Defense has been analyzing the security implications of environmental degradation since at least 2003, when a Pentagon-commissioned report examined scenarios in which abrupt climate change could destabilize the international order.² The analysis was initially controversial within the defense establishment. By 2014, the controversy had largely subsided.

The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon’s primary strategic planning document, formally identified climate change as a “threat multiplier” that would exacerbate existing risks to global stability.³ The language was deliberate. A threat multiplier does not create conflict from nothing. It takes existing vulnerabilities, such as water scarcity, food insecurity, ethnic tension, or weak governance, and amplifies them to the point where they become security crises.

The 2014 assessment focused primarily on the physical effects of climate change: rising sea levels threatening military installations, extreme weather events disrupting supply chains, and changing Arctic conditions creating new theaters of geopolitical competition. Biodiversity loss was not central to the analysis. Over the following decade, that changed.

The U.S. Director of National Intelligence’s Annual Threat Assessment, published each year for Congress, has progressively expanded its treatment of ecological disruption. The 2023 assessment identified “climate change and environmental degradation” as a structural threat to international stability, noting that the degradation of ecosystems, including fisheries collapse, soil erosion, and pollinator decline, compounds the effects of climate change on food and water security.⁴ The 2024 assessment went further, identifying specific ecological tipping points whose breach could trigger cascading failures in food production, water availability, and the economic systems that depend on them.⁵

The trajectory is clear. What began as an analysis of physical climate effects has expanded into a broader assessment of ecological system failure, of which biodiversity loss is a central component. The intelligence community has arrived at a conclusion that ecologists have been articulating for decades: the stability of human systems depends on the stability of natural systems, and natural systems are deteriorating at a rate that poses measurable risks to national security.

The food system vulnerability

The most immediate pathway from biodiversity loss to security risk runs through the global food system. The arithmetic is stark: approximately 75 percent of the global food supply depends on just 12 plant species and 5 animal species.⁶ This concentration creates a system that is productive but fragile, because the failure of any single component cascades rapidly through supply chains that have been optimized for efficiency rather than resilience.

The vulnerability is not hypothetical. The Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s killed approximately one million people and displaced another million, and it was caused by the failure of a single crop variety to a single pathogen.⁷ The genetic uniformity of the Gros Michel banana, which dominated global markets until the 1950s, made the entire industry vulnerable to Panama disease, a soil fungus that destroyed plantations across Central America and forced a wholesale shift to the Cavendish variety.⁸ The Cavendish now faces its own Panama disease variant, Tropical Race 4, which has spread across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, threatening a crop that provides food security for hundreds of millions of people.

These historical examples illustrate a structural problem that biodiversity loss is making worse. Wild relatives of domesticated crops contain genetic diversity that plant breeders rely on to develop resistance to new pests and diseases. As wild habitats shrink, these genetic reservoirs disappear. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations has documented the loss of approximately 75 percent of plant genetic diversity in agriculture over the twentieth century, as farmers worldwide shifted from diverse local varieties to a small number of high-yielding commercial cultivars.⁹

The security implications are direct. A nation that cannot feed its population faces internal instability. A region where multiple nations simultaneously experience food production failures faces the conditions for conflict. The intelligence community’s analysis identifies food system fragility as a primary mechanism through which biodiversity loss translates into security risk, not in some distant future but within current planning horizons.

The pollinator crisis and its economic scale

Among the specific biodiversity losses that intelligence analysts have flagged, pollinator decline occupies a prominent position because of its quantifiable economic impact. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), the biodiversity equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, assessed in 2016 that between $235 billion and $577 billion worth of annual global crop production is directly dependent on animal pollination.¹⁰

The range reflects uncertainty in the data, not disagreement about the direction. Crops that depend partially or entirely on pollinators include almonds, apples, blueberries, cherries, cocoa, coffee, cucumbers, melons, squash, and tomatoes, among others. In the United States alone, honey bee colonies have declined by approximately 40 percent since 2006, a trend driven by a combination of pesticide exposure, habitat loss, parasites (particularly the Varroa mite), and disease.¹¹

The pollinator crisis extends well beyond honey bees. Wild pollinators, including native bees, butterflies, moths, beetles, and hummingbirds, perform pollination services that managed honey bee colonies cannot fully replace. A 2023 study in Nature found that wild pollinator abundance has declined by an average of 30 percent across monitored regions in North America and Europe since the 1990s, with some species experiencing declines exceeding 70 percent.¹²

For intelligence analysts, the significance of pollinator decline is not ecological in the abstract. It is a measurable economic vulnerability. A sharp decline in pollination services would reduce crop yields for dozens of commercially important food crops, increase food prices, and create supply chain disruptions that affect global markets. The effects would fall disproportionately on developing nations that lack the agricultural infrastructure to compensate through managed pollination or crop substitution. In regions where food insecurity already contributes to social instability, pollinator collapse would compound existing risks.

Fisheries, protein, and the geopolitics of collapse

The world’s oceans provide another critical pathway from biodiversity loss to security risk. Approximately 3.3 billion people depend on fish for 20 percent or more of their animal protein intake, and this dependence is concentrated in the regions of the world where population growth is most rapid and alternative protein sources are least available.¹³

Global fisheries have been declining for decades. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that approximately 35 percent of global fish stocks are overfished, meaning they are being harvested at biologically unsustainable rates.¹⁴ An additional 57 percent are fished at their maximum sustainable yield, leaving effectively no margin for increased harvest. The trajectory, absent significant changes in management, points toward further decline.

The security implications of fisheries collapse are already visible. In West Africa, the depletion of fish stocks by industrial trawlers, many operating under distant-water fishing agreements with European and Asian nations, has destroyed the livelihoods of artisanal fishing communities.¹⁵ The economic displacement of these communities has been identified by multiple analysts as a contributing factor to irregular migration across the Mediterranean and to recruitment by armed groups operating in the Sahel region.

In the South China Sea, overlapping territorial claims and fish stock depletion have created a nexus of ecological and geopolitical competition. China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, and several other nations claim fishing rights in waters where fish populations are declining. The resulting confrontations, which have included the ramming of fishing vessels, the deployment of maritime militia, and the construction of artificial islands, are simultaneously environmental disputes and strategic competitions.¹⁶

The Arctic presents a related but distinct scenario. As sea ice retreats and ocean temperatures rise, fish populations are shifting northward into waters that were previously too cold to support commercial fisheries. This shift is creating new fishing grounds in areas where governance structures are weak or nonexistent, and where the strategic interests of Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, and other Arctic nations are in competition.¹⁷ The collapse of established fisheries in lower latitudes, combined with the emergence of new fisheries in contested Arctic waters, creates conditions for conflict that intelligence agencies are actively monitoring.

Water scarcity as a threat vector

Biodiversity loss affects water security through mechanisms that are well documented but poorly appreciated in security planning. Forests regulate water cycles by intercepting rainfall, reducing erosion, and maintaining the soil structure that allows water to infiltrate into aquifers. Wetlands filter contaminants, buffer floods, and recharge groundwater. Intact river ecosystems maintain the flow regimes that downstream communities depend on for irrigation, drinking water, and sanitation.

When these ecosystems are degraded, water systems fail. Deforestation in upstream watersheds increases the frequency and severity of floods downstream while simultaneously reducing dry-season water availability, because the forest’s capacity to store and slowly release water has been eliminated.¹⁸ Wetland destruction removes natural water treatment capacity, increasing the cost of providing clean water and, in communities that cannot afford treatment infrastructure, increasing exposure to waterborne disease.

The United Nations has projected that by 2025, approximately 1.8 billion people will live in regions experiencing absolute water scarcity, and two-thirds of the global population could be living under water-stressed conditions.¹⁹ These projections incorporate both climate change and the degradation of the ecosystems that regulate water availability. The biodiversity component of water scarcity, the loss of the biological systems that maintain water quality and regulate water flow, is frequently the more immediate driver.

For intelligence agencies, water scarcity is a established threat vector. The relationship between water stress and conflict has been documented across multiple regions. The Nile Basin, where Ethiopia’s construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam has created tensions with Egypt and Sudan, is a case where water scarcity and competing claims on a shared resource have the potential to escalate into interstate conflict.²⁰ The Indus Basin, shared by India and Pakistan, faces similar pressures as glacial melt alters the timing and volume of river flows that both nations depend on for agriculture.

Syria, Lake Chad, and the evidence of consequence

The connection between ecological degradation and security failure is not theoretical. Two cases, both extensively analyzed by the intelligence community, illustrate the pathway from environmental collapse to armed conflict.

Syria experienced its worst drought on record between 2006 and 2010. The drought, which climate scientists have attributed in part to anthropogenic climate change, destroyed approximately 85 percent of the country’s livestock and displaced an estimated 1.5 million people from rural areas to urban centers, particularly the cities of Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs.²¹ The internal displacement overwhelmed urban infrastructure, increased competition for jobs and services, and contributed to the social pressures that erupted into civil war in 2011.

The causal chain from drought to civil war is not simple, and no credible analyst claims that the drought “caused” the war. Syria’s conflict was driven by political repression, sectarian division, regional geopolitical competition, and the specific decisions of the Assad regime. But the drought created the conditions, mass displacement, economic distress, and social dislocation, that made the existing political tensions combustible. A 2015 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that the drought was a contributing factor in the conflict, one that interacted with pre-existing vulnerabilities to produce an outcome that neither the drought nor the political conditions alone would have generated.²²

Lake Chad provides a parallel case at a different scale. The lake, which sits at the intersection of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon, has lost approximately 90 percent of its surface area since the 1960s.²³ The causes include reduced rainfall, increased irrigation withdrawals, and the degradation of the surrounding watershed. The lake’s collapse has destroyed the livelihoods of approximately 30 million people who depend on it for fishing, farming, and pastoralism.

The security consequences have been severe. The Lake Chad region is the operational heartland of Boko Haram, the jihadist organization responsible for the kidnapping of the Chibok schoolgirls in 2014 and for a broader campaign of violence that has killed tens of thousands of people and displaced millions. Multiple analyses, including assessments by the United Nations Development Programme, have identified the economic desperation caused by the lake’s collapse as a significant factor in recruitment for armed groups.²⁴ Young men who cannot fish or farm are more susceptible to recruitment by organizations that offer income, purpose, and belonging. The ecological collapse did not create Boko Haram’s ideology, but it created the conditions of desperation that the organization exploits.

The Amazon tipping point and global consequences

Not all biodiversity-related security risks operate through local or regional conflict. Some operate at the level of global systems, and the Amazon basin represents the most significant of these.

The Amazon rainforest contains approximately 10 percent of all species on Earth and stores an estimated 150 to 200 billion metric tons of carbon.²⁵ It also functions as a continental-scale water pump, generating approximately half of its own rainfall through a process called transpiration, in which trees release moisture into the atmosphere that then falls as rain downwind. This moisture recycling system sustains rainfall patterns across South America, including the agricultural regions of southern Brazil and northern Argentina that produce a significant share of the world’s soybeans, beef, and grain.

Climate scientists have identified a tipping point beyond which the Amazon’s moisture recycling system could collapse, converting large portions of the forest from closed-canopy rainforest to open savanna or degraded woodland.²⁶ The tipping point is estimated to occur when cumulative deforestation reaches 20 to 25 percent of the original forest cover. As of 2024, approximately 17 percent of the Amazon has been deforested, with an additional 17 percent significantly degraded.²⁷

If the tipping point is crossed, the consequences would extend far beyond Brazil. The reduction in transpiration would alter rainfall patterns across South America, reducing agricultural productivity in regions that are major global food exporters. A 2023 study estimated that Amazon dieback could reduce soybean yields in southern Brazil by 15 to 25 percent, with cascading effects on global commodity markets, livestock feed prices, and food security in importing nations.²⁸

For intelligence agencies, the Amazon tipping point represents a scenario in which ecological collapse in one country triggers economic and food security crises in multiple countries simultaneously. The scenario is not a distant projection. It is a plausible outcome within current deforestation trajectories, and the security implications, including food price spikes, migration pressures, and the destabilization of governments dependent on agricultural exports, are within the planning horizons of defense and intelligence organizations.

Climate migration and the numbers

The World Bank’s 2021 Groundswell report projected that by 2050, climate change could force 216 million people to migrate within their own countries across six regions: Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, Latin America, East Asia and the Pacific, North Africa, and Eastern Europe and Central Asia.²⁹ The projections incorporate the effects of water scarcity, declining crop productivity, rising sea levels, and the degradation of ecosystems that support livelihoods.

The biodiversity component of these projections is embedded throughout. Communities that depend on fisheries that collapse will move. Farmers whose soil has degraded to the point of unproductivity will move. Pastoralists whose grazing lands have been consumed by desertification will move. Coastal communities whose mangrove and coral reef protections have been destroyed, leaving them exposed to storm surge and erosion, will move.

Migration at this scale does not occur without friction. Internal migration concentrates populations in urban areas that may lack the infrastructure to absorb them. Cross-border migration generates political tensions between sending and receiving countries. The European migration crisis of 2015, which involved approximately 1.3 million asylum seekers, reshaped the political landscape of the continent, contributing to the rise of nationalist movements and straining the institutional foundations of the European Union.³⁰ The projected scale of climate-related migration is an order of magnitude larger.

Intelligence agencies treat migration as a security variable not because migrants are threats but because mass displacement destabilizes the systems, governance, infrastructure, social services, political consensus, that maintain order. When those systems are overwhelmed, the conditions for conflict, political extremism, and state failure become more likely. The biodiversity dimensions of migration, the collapse of fisheries, the degradation of soils, the loss of ecosystem services that support rural livelihoods, are among the primary drivers of the displacement that intelligence agencies are projecting.

The Arctic as a convergence point

The Arctic illustrates the convergence of biodiversity loss and geopolitical competition in its most concentrated form. Arctic warming is occurring at approximately four times the global average rate, driving changes in sea ice extent, permafrost stability, and marine and terrestrial ecosystems that are unprecedented in the observational record.³¹

The ecological changes are severe. Arctic sea ice extent has declined by approximately 13 percent per decade since 1979, with the most dramatic losses in summer months.³² The decline in sea ice has cascading effects on Arctic marine ecosystems, from the algae that grow on the underside of the ice to the polar bears, walruses, and seals that depend on it. Permafrost thaw is releasing stored carbon (both CO2 and methane) and destabilizing infrastructure across the Arctic, including military installations, pipelines, and transportation networks.

Simultaneously, the retreat of sea ice is opening the Arctic to commercial activity that was previously impossible. Shipping routes through the Northern Sea Route (along Russia’s Arctic coast) and the Northwest Passage (through the Canadian archipelago) are becoming navigable for longer periods each year. Seabed resources, including oil, gas, and rare earth minerals, are becoming accessible. Fisheries are expanding into waters that were previously ice-covered.

The geopolitical competition for Arctic resources and strategic position involves Russia, the United States, Canada, Norway, Denmark (through Greenland), and increasingly China, which has declared itself a “near-Arctic state” despite having no Arctic territory.³³ Russia has invested heavily in military infrastructure along its Arctic coast, reopening Cold War-era bases and deploying new capabilities. The United States has increased its Arctic military presence. NATO has identified the Arctic as a region of growing strategic importance.

The biodiversity crisis and the geopolitical competition are not parallel developments. They are causally linked. The ecological changes that are destroying Arctic ecosystems are the same changes that are opening the region to the competition. The loss of sea ice that threatens marine mammals is the loss of sea ice that enables shipping. The permafrost thaw that releases carbon is the permafrost thaw that exposes mineral deposits. The security threat and the ecological crisis are, in the Arctic, the same phenomenon viewed from different analytical frameworks.

What the intelligence community is saying

The convergence of these analyses across multiple intelligence agencies and defense establishments represents a significant shift in how security professionals understand threats. For most of the post-World War II period, national security was defined in terms of state adversaries, military capabilities, and ideological competition. Environmental issues were treated as background conditions, relevant to development policy or humanitarian assistance but not to the core business of security planning.

That framing has changed. The UK assessment, the Pentagon’s threat multiplier analysis, the DNI’s annual threat assessments, and the classified analyses that underpin them reflect a recognition that the stability of human systems depends on the stability of ecological systems in ways that are direct, measurable, and consequential for national security.

The intelligence community is not making an environmental argument. It is not advocating for biodiversity conservation on ethical or aesthetic grounds. It is applying the same analytical frameworks it uses for any other threat: identifying the hazard, assessing the probability and timeline of its realization, evaluating the severity of its consequences, and recommending responses. When that analysis is applied to biodiversity loss, the conclusion is consistent across agencies and across nations: this is a threat of sufficient scale and imminence to warrant treatment as a national security priority.

The gap between this assessment and the policy response is substantial. Defense and intelligence agencies can identify threats, but they cannot, on their own, reverse the biodiversity loss that generates them. The responses required, reforming agricultural systems, protecting critical ecosystems, regulating resource extraction, managing fisheries sustainably, investing in ecosystem restoration, fall outside the jurisdiction of security agencies and within the jurisdiction of environmental, agricultural, and development policy.

The significance of the intelligence community’s assessment is not that it tells us something we did not know. Ecologists, conservation biologists, and environmental scientists have been documenting the security implications of biodiversity loss for decades. The significance is that the institutions whose professional mandate is to identify threats to national survival have now independently reached the same conclusion. When intelligence agencies classify biodiversity loss as a national security risk, they are saying, in the language of strategic analysis, what scientists have been saying in the language of ecology: the systems that sustain human civilization are failing, and the failure is accelerating.

The question is no longer whether biodiversity loss is a security threat. The intelligence community has answered that question. The question is whether the political systems responsible for responding to security threats will respond to this one with the urgency that the assessments demand.