Barry Gardiner

Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not. It is a sober assessment of the risks that global biodiversity loss and the consequent ecosystem collapse pose to our human security. That is why we were never meant to see the report: the previous Administration considered that it was just too alarming. Economic insecurity will become more likely. Migration will rise as development gains reverse. Serious organised crime will look to exploit and gain control over scarce resources. Pandemic risks will increase. Conflict and military escalation will become more likely. The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public. They were even more wrong to fail to make the case by setting out to the public the incredibly good news about how we can avoid those risks and create a world that looks much better than the one we currently inhabit. The convention on biological diversity COP coming up in Yerevan will look at the 23 targets of the global biodiversity framework, which set out the pattern for what we can do to change all this. What happens if we actually achieve them? Our air is cleaner, our water is purer, our energy is cheaper, our health is better, our economy is richer and our world is safer. What’s not to like?