01.10.2026

Publish the report in full

In what could be the stirrings of climate socialism the JIC security chiefs are warning of apocalyptic dangers, writes Eddie Ford. We demand complete openness on such matters. The public need to know what the government does not want the public to know

Thanks to foreign secretary Ed Miliband, the damning report from the Joint Intelligence Committee on climate change and the associated pressing dangers is back in the news. Apparently it does not paint a comforting, a reassuring picture. Indeed, one person who had seen the whole report described it as “apocalyptic” to The Guardian.¹

The significance of the JIC, of course, not only that it consists of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, but that it reports directly to the cabinet office - therefore it cannot be dismissed lightly. The report was originally due to be published last October, apparently causing considerable excitement amongst journalists, but was pulled at the last minute by the government for being “too negative” - though The Guardian revealed some of the findings through a series of leaks.²

After several refused attempts under the Freedom of Information Act, the Green Alliance thinktank finally had some success in January. A redacted 14-page version of the report, Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security, was posted on the Defra website without a single press release or public announcement.³

The Times reported the day after that it had seen an internal, unabridged version of the assessment that included warnings much graver than the Defra one, but ministers continue to resist calls for the full report to be made public.⁴ A retired general told The Guardian that it was not surprising that the JIC report was suppressed and redacted, as it was “very rare” for security reports to be published - but that does not make it any less reprehensible.

Then Miliband spilt the beans. But we still did not get full transparency. The foreign secretary gave a presentation about the JIC report’s main findings to a closed-door meeting of foreign ministries from around the world, including those of the EU, Kenya and Australia - the latter being in charge of the negotiations next month at Cop31 in Turkey.⁵

Needless to say, full copies of the report were not distributed. The government has something to hide that concerns the whole world. We therefore unequivocally back calls for the JIC report to be made public. Adrian Ramsay, the Green Party MP for Waveney Valley, is right when he asks: “Why has our government still not published its response to how it will address the stark findings?” The JIC report and the government response must be openly published and published in full. No more secrecy when it comes to the true scale of the climate crisis.

Cascading

Having said that, Miliband’s briefing at the UN certainly gave a powerful sense of the urgent nature of the crisis - clearly he wanted it put out there in terms of his agenda, even as foreign secretary, when it comes to raising awareness of the dangers global warming poses to ‘national security’ and ‘defence’. He emphasised how El Niño, has supercharged climate breakdown. It is “already set to be the most intense in living memory” and will test the world’s food systems as never before - intensifying climate shocks that “compound and cascade across borders, threatening food and water security, displacing communities, putting pressure on markets and scarring economies.”

Miliband was also explicit that this year’s heatwaves, bad harvests and food price inflation showed governments what they were in for and why it must be dealt with at the highest levels, as climate change and nature loss “have never been issues for climate and environment ministers alone” - rather, he said, they are “defining challenges for our citizens, our economies, our foreign policy and our national security”.

In other words, the collapse of natural systems around the world will lead to more competition, more conflict and mass migration. Miliband stressed the question of food and energy shortages, not least petrol. Food security is a particularly acute question for the UK, of course, as it is heavily dependent on imported food. About 40% of its food is imported, including 80% of its fruit and 47% of its vegetables, constituting one of the highest rates of reliance on imported fruit in Europe.⁶

The JIC’s report, which you can only regard as being straight from the horse’s mouth, warns of the “cascading risks” from the degradation of some of the planet’s ecosystems, assessing it as a “reasonable worst case scenario” for the impacts of nature loss on the UK’s ‘security’.⁷ It highlights six regions, based on the likelihood of ecosystem collapse and the impacts, when they do: (1) the Amazon rainforest; (2) the Congo Basin; (3) the south-east Asian coral reefs; (4) the south-east Asian mangroves; (5) the Himalayas and (6) the boreal forests in Canada and Russia.

All of them, warn the spy chiefs, are on the “pathway to collapse”, yet they are “critical for UK national security”. There is also the distinct danger of the Gulf Stream slowing or even shutting down. Paradoxically, that could mean global warming making the UK colder and wetter, with more dank conditions and therefore less agricultural productivity.

Keir Starmer

Criminally, under Starmer, the UK slashed its overseas aid to the vulnerable countries where many of these ecosystems are located. International climate finance has been reduced from £11.6 billion in total over 2021-26, to about £2 billion a year for the next two years, and the previous ringfencing of spending on nature and forests within that budget has been dropped - Starmer feeling the pressure from Reform UK and the right in general to be less ‘woke’ and more worried about the ‘concerns of ordinary Brits’. Why should we care so much about people who are far away and we know little about?

In an implicit rebuke, Miliband will appoint a new special representative for climate security, as well as a new ministerial taskforce on “the national security and resilience risks of a changing climate and nature loss”, with military and security experts, as well as climate scientists. He also announced £330 million in funding for the Global Environment Fund, one of the principal vehicles for funding nature protection in the developing world, and £400 million for Brazil’s Tropical Forests Forever Facility. Obviously, far too little and far too late, but something more for Reform and the climate deniers to complain about.

You could argue that the JIC report is the first inkling of what we in the CPGB have argued for some time now, which is the possibility of ‘climate socialism’. By that we do not mean some sort of rule of the working class - quite the opposite, in fact. More something along the lines of the Kriegssozialismus introduced by the German high command from 1916 onwards, becoming a draconian state carrying out emergency measures at the expense of working class rights and working class living standards.

But you would expect such inklings from the likes of the JIC. They are not worried about this week’s polls or today’s news headlines. Instead, the spy chiefs are expected to think in the longer term about the interests of the state itself. If there is any strategic thinking going on from elements of the ruling class, then the “apocalyptic” JIC report might be evidence of it - not the myopic nationalism of Reform, Restore and Kemi Badenoch’s Tory Party.

Instead of dealing with the threat of the global climate crisis the far right campaign against net zero and migration – as the climate scientist Bill McGuire, recently commented: “cognitive dissonance doesn’t even begin to describe the idiocy of such thinking”.⁸ They want us to pretend that nothing is happening and just close the door on migrants - let them perish in the English Channel. Maybe the Royal Navy or the Coast Guard goes out and ‘does a Tommo’, sinking the boats and dinghies crammed full of men, women and children. Or RNLI volunteers refuse to rescue people at sea because they do not have the required papers.

The far right closes its eyes to climate change and dismisses net zero targets as a ‘hoax’. But the point about climate change, as the spy chiefs remind us, is that no-one - not even a trillionaire like Elon Musk - can escape its consequences, even if they dream of turning Mars into a bolt hole, rather than the hell hole it actually is. No matter if you are in America and have the luxury of no dependence on oil imports - with the strongest military in the world and the knowledge that you are the dominant global power when it comes to finance - there is still no escape. The climate crisis affects everybody. What happens when your wheat belt turns to desert? Far from being a rhetorical question, this is a very real danger that will stare us in the face in the not too far future.

Uneven

Further driving home the nature of the crisis, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has just issued a report stating that the world faces a “narrowing window” to restore forests essential for food security and resistance to the climate emergency.⁹ More than 489 million hectares of forests have been cleared since 1990, while an even greater area is degraded, the world body said in a call for governments to make forest restoration a national priority.

Trying to keep positive, its ‘State of the world’s forests’ report acknowledges recent steps in protection and tree planting around the globe, but action has not kept pace with commitments. For example, over the past two decades, national, regional and global initiatives have promised to place more than one billion hectares of land under restoration, but barely a fifth of that is actually being restored - the FOA observing that “progress is uneven” and “insufficient to meet growing global needs”.

The real question is: who can do something about the climate crisis? While some elements of the state core appear to recognise the problem, ultimately it comes down to ordinary people like you and me organising. In the last analysis, the ruling class is incapable of doing what is necessary, because what we have is a series of antagonistic capitalist states, one pitted against the other. Not bonds of mutual cooperation, but bonds of mutual competition - going all the way up to and including the possibility of a nuclear exchange that ends human civilisation before the climate crisis does.