UK Security Assessment identifies global ecosystem degradation and collapse as a national security risk
4 Maret 2026
Writing for the NGO Forest Coalition*, Cassie Dummett discusses the Assessment’s findings, and measures that should be taken to address them.
In January 2026, the Government of the United Kingdom released a national Security Assessment that identifies global ecosystem degradation and collapse as a high risk to UK national security.
The report, put together by the Joint Intelligence Committee, identifies six ecosystems as particularly important for the UK, of which four are forests: the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin rainforest, the boreal forests of Canada and Russia, and Southeast Asia’s mangroves. The report links the destruction of forests to reduced crop yields, water insecurity, changes to weather patterns, carbon emissions, new zoonotic diseases and loss of pharmaceutical resources.
According to the report, the biggest cause of biodiversity loss is food production. The UK imports food that has been grown on deforested land, thus contributing to global deforestation through trade and finance.
The NGO Forest Coalition issued a media statement and wrote a letter to the Secretary of State for the Environment, Minister Emma Reynolds, calling on the UK Government to urgently legislate to end deforestation and related human rights abuses in UK supply chains.
Such legislation has already been envisaged. The Environment Act was passed in 2021, which promised to prohibit the UK use of produce grown on illegally deforested land. The law has never been implemented, however, and since then the UK has been linked to a further 39,000 hectares of deforestation.
The Coalition asked for action to be taken to implement Schedule 17 of the Environment Act and to go further, by ending imports of commodities grown on all deforested land. We also asked the Government to take action to ensure that the rights of Indigenous and local communities, who depend on forests for their livelihoods, are protected.
UK financial institutions have provided more than US$1.2 billion in financing to “forest-risk” companies since the 2015 Paris Agreement. The NGO Forest Coalition called on the Secretary of State to stop the financial flows driving deforestation, pointing out that safeguarding forests is a national and global security priority.
Analysis by Earthsight, a member of the NGO Forest Coalition, found that £4.3 billion in UK exports to Europe will be covered by the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), including rubber tyres, cocoa products and beef. UK retailers in the Retail Soy Group expressed support for the EUDR, and asked the UK to bring in similar due diligence measures for commodities driving deforestation.
* The NGO Forest Coalition is a coalition of UK NGOs working on forests in the context of climate change, biodiversity, development and human rights to address deforestation and associated human rights abuses.
Image: Richard Whitcombe/Shutterstock
Categories: News, Forest Watch