“To cover up 1 high level report … looks odd,” remarked Caroline Lucas, the former leader of the United Kingdom’s Green Party. “To cover up 2 looks like a pattern.” Lucas was commenting on reporting in The Guardian revealing that the Labour government was again burying an explosive report by U.K. military and intelligence leaders warning that the global collapse of ecosystems poses grave threats to the U.K.’s security and food supply within as little as five years.
The U.K. “has no future” if it cannot “restore the natural world on which we rely for our food, water, and clean air,” said Chris Hinchliff, who is among the members of Parliament pressing the government to release the full report, rather than a shorter, redacted version. Even that version, which was obtained by The Guardian’s Fiona Harvey, “paints a devastating picture of severe food shortages, price rises, migration, political destabilisation, and possible war, resulting from the collapse of ecosystems, fuelled by the human-induced climate crisis and over-exploitation,” Harvey wrote.
Meanwhile, massive wildfires in France and Spain have been forcing hundreds of thousands of people to evacuate—and prompting forthright countermeasures from governments. In Spain, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said the fires were effects of the “climate emergency.” For the second year in a row, the prime minister responded to ferocious wildfires by calling on political parties across the ideological spectrum “to reach an agreement, a State pact, to address the climate emergency.”
As if to validate the U.K. spy chiefs’ report in real time, food production in Europe is already suffering from the extreme heat of recent weeks, which has been “sucking soils dry.” France’s maize harvest is the lowest in 50 years; across Europe, nine million tons of grain have been lost. Such losses are of particular concern for the U.K., which imports much of its food.
The U.K. report is notable for highlighting not only climate change but the related problem of biodiversity loss and collapsing ecosystems. For example, scientists have warned that continued logging and high temperatures are pushing the Amazon rainforest toward an irreversible shift into a savannah. That would drive further climate chaos as the Amazon transforms from an absorber into an emitter of carbon.
Aides to former Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer twice quashed plans to release the U.K. report, Harvey reported, allegedly for fear that the climate-denying Reform UK Party would attack Labour for putting climate concerns ahead of the cost of living. Climate denial persists in the U.K. media as well: Even as wildfires scorched Europe, the front page of the Rupert Murdoch–owned Times (of London) featured a rant against the net-zero-emissions goal that scientists say is essential to preserving a livable planet. And across Europe, most news outlets are still not reporting that climate change is what is driving these fires and heat waves, even as the outlets illustrate their stories with “fun in the sun” images of people at the beach. “The pictures do not convey the severity of the moment Europe finds itself in,” observed Al Jazeera English.
Andy Burnham, who replaced Starmer as prime minister on July 20, has yet to speak publicly about the buried report or climate change in general. He has said, however, that he is open to approving increased drilling for oil and gas off Britain’s coast in the North Sea. This, as the smoke from wildfires in France and Spain—and in Scotland, in the U.K.—is estimated to cause “well over 100,000 excess deaths globally,” according to Dr. Theodore Keeping of Imperial College London.
Covering Climate Now’s 89 Percent Project spotlights the reality that 80 to 89 percent of the world’s people want their governments to take stronger climate action. In this summer of smoke and fire, the public is waiting for their politicians and their press to respond. “Voters are much more tuned into this than most of our [elected] representatives are,” author George Monbiot said on the U.K.’s Channel 4. “And indeed than most of the media is.”
This article is published as part of the global journalism collaboration Covering Climate Now.
