A follow-up thinkpiece to The Classified Role of UK Forests: Adaptation to National Security Threats
Disclaimer: This is a speculative foresight essay. It draws on publicly available risk frameworks, recent academic literature, and reasoned extrapolation rather than any privileged access to classified material.
My previous thinkpiece posed a focussed and highly tactical question: what role could UK’s forests play if the Cabinet Office’s national security assessment on ecosystem collapse proved right. I deliberately bounded that question in trees and forestry. Instead, in this thinkpiece I explore how ecological collapse would sit alongside other forces capable of doing significant, possibly irreversible, damage to human civilisation this century.
Importantly, it is the the connections between these forces that constitute a central and driving force. It’s tempting to list categories of civilisational risk side by side as though they compete in rank. However, these risks do not run parallel one another, but rather they constitute a single complex system. The main risks come from how tightly any failures are coupled to one or another, not from how large any single one is on its own.
Six categories of risk
The main risks can be described in at least six categories, each behaving differently enough to warrant separate treatment before the connections between them are considered further.
- Ecosystem and resource collapse. Soil degradation, pollinator decline, fishery exhaustion, freshwater stress, forest health decline, urban tree death, wildfire and more. Some of these are gradual and slow-moving, but are already underway, with long lags built into the physics and biology, which means the worst effects arrive decades after the decisions that caused them, regardless of what’s done now. The scale is easy to understate: global wildlife populations have declined by 73% since 1970, and in the UK, flowering plant species are down 54% over the same period. The Joint Intelligence Organisation (JIO) assessment names six ecosystems as critical to UK national security specifically, the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin, South East Asian coral reefs and mangroves, the Himalayas, and the boreal forests of Russia and Canada, and judges, with low confidence, that some may begin collapsing from 2030 and others from 2050. Ecosystem services contributed an estimated £1.8 trillion to the UK economy in 2022 alone, which is the scale of the economic risk.
- Institutional and leadership failure. The oldest risk in all civilisations, repeated over time in memorial. I believe that megalomaniacs are more dangerous today than at any time in history, and it seems the world is suffering under several at the present time. All other categories are strongly influenced by leadership in terms of potential to cause catastrophe. Resource stress is only escalated by poor leadership responses.
- Nuclear and WMD infrastructure fragility. Distinct from leadership failure, this is the risk that the technical systems designed to prevent catastrophe, early-warning satellites, command-and-control protocols, arms-control verification, fail on their own terms. It has a documented history of near-misses.
- Engineered and natural pandemics. Post-COVID governance is better than it was, but the barrier to designing, rather than merely encountering a pathogen, has fallen faster than the barrier to detecting or containing one has risen.
- Artificial intelligence. Not a standalone threat so much as a multiplier connecting to every other category: it lowers the skill and cost required to design a pathogen, run a disinformation campaign, or compress the decision window a leader has before acting. It may be an unreliable party in managing or overseeing destructive weaponry.
- Critical infrastructure and supply-chain fragility. The electricity grid, undersea data and power cables, semiconductor fabrication concentrated in a handful of facilities, just-in-time global logistics, and a small number of maritime chokepoints, Hormuz, Suez, the Bab el-Mandeb, Malacca, through which a wildly disproportionate share of the world’s oil, gas and container traffic is forced to pass. Collectively, these connective arteries of global trade are those that can readily turn a regional shock into a global one.
Distinctions between risk categories are highly important, while each one evolves at the coupling point between all other risks. Rather than deal further in abstract concepts, it’s worth tracing one real cascade in enough detail to appreciate the mechanics.
Some worked examples of the coupling
Population Displacements in the early 21st Century
In the summer of 2010, an exceptional heatwave and drought across western Russia cut the country’s wheat harvest by a quarter and triggered wildfires across millions of hectares of forest and peatland. Russia, then one of the world’s largest wheat exporters, responded in August that year by banning exports outright. Global wheat prices had already been climbing on the back of poor harvests elsewhere; the ban tipped a tight market into a sharp spike, and contract prices in import-dependent countries such as Egypt and Tunisia rose immediately. Food and bread prices in several of those countries climbed through the following months, landing hardest on populations already living close to the edge of poverty. A number of researchers have identified that price spike as a contributing factor, among several, in the unrest that became the Arab Spring the following year.
Syria’s trajectory over the same period is more contested. The country suffered its own severe multi-year drought from 2006 to 2010, and there’s reasonable scientific consensus that the drought was unusually intense and pushed substantial numbers of farming families toward the country’s cities. There is less analytical consensus about how much weight that migration carries in explaining the uprising that followed, against the much larger and less disputed roles played by decades of poor governance, water mismanagement, and the Assad regime’s handling of both the drought and the initial protests. It isn’t that drought caused a civil war, more that ecological stress removed a margin of resilience that a better-governed, less brittle state might have absorbed, and that Assad’s state couldn’t absorb it.
The war that followed drove one of the largest displacement crises Europe has faced this century, subsequently feeding directly into the politics of several European states through the following decade. A drought on one continent, transmitted through a grain market, a fragile state, and a migration route, reshaped elections thousands of miles away. None of the individual links in that chain required anything extreme. Each was a failure of an ordinary system operating slightly outside its tolerances at the same time as several others.
This is the pattern the JIO’s modelling is trying to address, and it’s the pattern most single-domain risk writing, mine included perhaps, tends to simplify. A forestry response to ecological stress addresses the first link. Without combining the second, third or other risks, and it offers at best an incomplete analysis, perhaps even a dishonest perspective in the context of foresight.
On the brink of nuclear armageddon
The nuclear and infrastructure category deserves its own worked example, because it illustrates something the ecological cascade doesn’t, namely how narrow the margin for error already is, even before AI enters the picture.
On the night of 26 September 1983, the Soviet Union’s early-warning satellite system reported that the United States had launched a nuclear missile at the USSR, then, within minutes, four more. The duty officer at the command bunker outside Moscow had a matter of minutes to decide whether to report the launch up the chain of command, a report that would very likely have triggered a Soviet retaliatory strike. The officer judged, against what the system itself was telling him, that a genuine American first strike would not consist of only five missiles, and instead reported a malfunction. He was correct of course. Investigators later traced the false alarm to sunlight reflecting off high-altitude clouds at a rare angle, misread by the satellites as missile plumes.
The point of retelling this story is less about the drama of one man’s judgement, but that the system built to prevent nuclear war has already failed on its own terms at least once in a documented, declassified case. Civilisation as we know it only survived because a human being was positioned in the loop with enough time, and enough scepticism of the machine in front of him, to override it. That is precisely the kind of margin that AI-accelerated command-and-control, faster sensor fusion, machine-generated threat assessments, decision-support systems designed to compress response times, is explicitly built to remove. The case for AI in this context is speed and pattern-detection at superhuman scale. This 1983 case is a sobering reminder that what actually saved the world that night from nuclear armageddon was the opposite of speed.
A UK Reasonable Worst-Case Scenario: 2050
The examples considered above have traced a single chain, one shock rippling outwards from its origin. This section explores ‘polycrisis’ or cascading and compounding risks, considering what might happen as a Reasonable Worst-Case Scenario (RWCS) when several pressures hit the same place at once using the example of the UK.
The UK is a useful example because, as my previous thinkpiece argued, it starts from one of Europe’s most fragile positions: 13% woodland cover, a food system heavily dependent on imports, and, as of the mid-2020s, its own domestic ecological and social stresses already visible before any of the international cascades above are added on top. What follows is a Reasonable Worst-Case Scenario in the JIO’s sense. It is certainly not intended as a prediction, but a plausible, low-probability, high-impact pathway worth planning against, applying the Professional Head of Intelligence Assessment (PHIA) probability framework or ‘yardstick’ rather than a dramatic licence.
The domestic starting position. This part of the scenario, like the chokepoint section below, barely needs projecting forward, because it is largely already happening. Summer 2026 has just been provisionally confirmed as the UK’s warmest on record, a mean temperature of 16.5°C across June to August, beating the previous record of 16.1°C set only the year before. Five separate heatwaves brought temperatures into the high 20s and low 30s, the UK saw three separate days above 37°C for the first time, and parts of the country went 56 to 62 consecutive days without rain, driving wildfires and widespread drought conditions. The record isn’t an isolated spike: the top six warmest UK summers on record have all occurred this century, and three of them this decade alone, with 2026 now displacing 2025, 2018, 2006, 2003 and the 2022 Wennington summer. The same heat pushed National Grid warnings that the electricity system is ‘right on the limit,’ with power-cut risk raised as a live operational concern rather than a modelled scenario. Layer that onto a housing stock, water infrastructure and NHS capacity already under strain from decades of underinvestment, and the 2050 starting position isn’t a projection so much as an extrapolation of a trend that has already broken its own record two years running.
The trigger. Here too the pattern has a live precedent rather than a purely hypothetical one: the Copernicus Climate Change Service confirmed this same summer that August 2026 tied the record for the world’s hottest month, with Western Europe recording its warmest summer ever and severe drought hitting France, the UK, Hungary, Romania and Serbia simultaneously, a genuinely multi-country event rather than a UK-only one. The scenario simply extends that pattern: a multi-year drought across the Mediterranean and Fertile Crescent, similar in character to the Syrian episode of 2006 to 2010 but affecting a wider band of countries simultaneously and for longer, collapses grain and vegetable-oil yields across several of the UK’s major import partners at once. The UK imports around 40% of its food and, as the JIO assessment itself notes, is not currently able to be self-sufficient, which is precisely the exposure such a shock would test. Domestically, the same drought conditions extend across lowland England, curtailing UK cereal and horticultural output in the same growing season, removing the option of substituting stalled imports with a strong home harvest. Wildfire risk, already elevated by drier summers, produces a UK fire season closer to what southern Europe typically experiences, straining fire services and destroying agricultural land and plantation forestry simultaneously, the latter removing exactly the strategic timber and biomass reserve the previous piece in this series argued that the UK would need most at this moment.
The chokepoint multiplier. This part of the scenario requires no extrapolation at all, because it is already ‘running’. Since February 2026, Iran’s confrontation with the United States and Israel has left the Strait of Hormuz, the route for roughly a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil and a comparable share of its liquefied natural gas, subject to blockade, mining and attacks on tankers, producing fuel shortages across Asia and a sustained rise in global oil prices even where a formal ceasefire has notionally applied. At the same time, Houthi attacks and blockade threats in the Red Sea have continued to push a large share of Asia-Europe container and tanker traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, adding one to two weeks to transit times and raising freight and insurance costs on a route the UK’s own food and fertiliser imports rely on. Add either chokepoint disruption to the drought scenario above, rather than treating it as a separate crisis, and the mechanism compounds directly: oil price rises raise the cost of the diesel that runs tractors, grain driers, and the artificial-fertiliser production process itself, while the same rerouted, lengthened shipping lanes are now also carrying the food volumes a drought-hit global market can least afford to move slowly. A world with one open chokepoint under strain is already difficult. A Reasonable Worst-Case Scenario worth taking seriously is one with two or three simultaneously constrained, Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb and, in a wider Pacific crisis, Malacca or the Taiwan Strait, happening simultaneously as the agricultural shock described above. The UK, importing a large share of both its calories and its fuel, sits exposed at both ends of these compounding factors.
The transmission mechanism. Global grain markets behave as they did in 2010: exporting nations facing their own shortages restrict exports to protect domestic supply, price spikes ripple outward, and countries with weaker governance and thinner fiscal buffers absorb the shock worst. Following the pattern visible in the Fertile Crescent in the previous decade, several states in that wider drought band see rural livelihoods collapse into urban and cross-border displacement, this time at a scale the UNHCR’s own 2050 climate-displacement projections put well above anything Europe managed during the 2015 to 2016 crisis. Some proportion of that displacement reaches UK shores and asylum systems, arriving into a domestic system already stretched by its own drought, its own food-price inflation, and housing and public-service capacity that has not expanded to match.
Civil unrest. The 2024 riots that followed the Southport stabbings are the clearest domestic precedent. The violence was driven by disinformation, spread deliberately by far-right organisers online, about the identity of an attacker who was not in fact an asylum seeker, exploiting genuine local strain over housing and services as kindling. The lesson for a 2050 scenario is not that migration volume itself produces unrest, but that a population under simultaneous domestic pressure (water restrictions, food inflation, housing shortage, an NHS at capacity) is far more susceptible to disinformation that assigns blame to newly arrived, visible outsiders, especially when local authorities and asylum accommodation are the most visible pressure point in a community that already feels neglected. The RWCS worth planning against is not simply ‘more migrants, more unrest.’ It is a domestic population under compounding, visible ecological strain, encountering a disinformation environment substantially more capable than 2024’s, given how the AI category discussed earlier in this piece lowers the cost of producing convincing, targeted false claims at scale and speed.
What this scenario is and isn’t for. Naturally, none of this is a claim that any of it will happen. It is, in the JIO’s own terms, a Reasonable Worst-Case Scenario: a pathway with a low but non-trivial probability, constructed from mechanisms that have already occurred individually (the 2022 heatwave, the 2010 grain shock, the 2024 riots) and asking what happens when they stack together rather than happen in isolation. The actionable conclusions are beyond this author’s competence, but clearly it is imperative that decision maker’s consider the resilience of the domestic system so that is more capable of absorbing shocks: food security margins, water infrastructure, wildfire-resistant land management, and a media and civic environment robust enough to withstand a disinformation campaign arriving at the same moment as a genuine domestic hardship.
What a poly-crisis perspective means for anyone working a single area
Once the interconnected nature of the system is understood, risks are seen not as competing issues but as points where the underlying fragility can be addressed. That has a direct implication for domain specialists, professional foresters like myself very much included.
A well-executed programme of agroforestry, catchment restoration, and strategic timber reserve, the pathway I set out in the previous thinkpiece, genuinely reduces the UK’s exposure at the first link in a cascade like the one above. It does not address the other five key risks. It does not make a fragile trading partner’s government more resilient, does not slow an AI-compressed decision cycle in a nuclear command bunker on the other side of the world, and does not reduce the concentration of semiconductor manufacturing that would turn a Taiwan Strait crisis into a global technology and defence-supply shock within weeks. Regrettably, it will not banish some of the worse examples of megalomania in leaders that the world has ever seen. Yet none of these risks are a reason to abandon the forestry work, nor to lose hope. Landscape-scale resilience remains one of the few levers actually within a single nation’s control, and doing nothing only guarantees a worse starting position when the next cascade begins. I recognise that claiming a single-domain intervention (in my case ecosystems) as a solution to multi-domain risks is exactly the kind of shallow synthesis that I have attempted to avoid in this thinkpiece.
Forestry isn’t the only land-based profession arriving at this conclusion, which is itself worth noting. The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors recently published its own reading of the same JIO assessment in its Land Journal, aimed at surveyors, agricultural advisors and rural land managers rather than foresters, and it maps the identical structure the assessment itself sets out: degraded ecosystem function leads to biological and physical impacts, which lead to human security risks, which lead to international security risks. The four-stage cascade, stated in the government’s own terms, is essentially the argument that this thinkpiece has explored in more depth. The RICS piece asks surveyors to build ecological literacy, prioritise brownfield development over ecologically valuable land, and advise rural clients toward practices that restore rather than deplete the assets they manage. Different professional vocabulary, same node in the same system. When foresters, chartered surveyors and intelligence analysts converge independently on the same structural perspectives of the risks, that’s a strong signal we should all sit up and take notice.
This led me to consider what the highest level strategic actions might be for foresters and forest managers:
The role of Hybrid Foresight
The framework that I proposed with co-author Gillian Petrokofsky in Forestry is highly relevant here: see Code-and-canopy-the-future-of-forestry-foresight. Hybrid Foresight, using AI to continuously scan weak signals across literature, policy and environmental data, combined with human expert contextual judgement, was designed to address specific challenges such as tree pathogens and timber markets, as much as catastrophic ecosystem collapse. The reason it scales to the wider problem is structural: no single institution currently sits across all six categories above. The ecologists modelling soil collapse don’t sit in a nuclear command review. The officials reviewing early-warning protocols aren’t reading horizon-scanning literature on Sahelian agriculture. Almost nobody with authority over frontier AI development is systematically tracking how their systems interact with food security in fragile states. A hybrid approach, human judgement directing machine-scale pattern recognition across domains that have historically been governed in isolation, is one of the few plausible mechanisms for spotting a cascade while there may be still time to intervene.
Conclusion
Trees cannot save civilisation from a compressed nuclear decision window, and of course I do not mean to imply otherwise. What a proper accounting of six interlocking risk categories, and some worked examples, I have attempted to show that the domains most of us specialise in are not separate problems competing for funding and column inches. All are inter-related in complex structures, and the coupling between them is what determines whether stress resolves into adaptation or into collapse. The JIO’s willingness to model ecosystem collapse with the same rigour usually reserved for military threats is a sign that this is starting to be understood at the level where it matters. Building institutions and approaches capable of watching the interactions and couplings is the urgent task which now lies ahead.
Further Reading
- Hemery, G. (2026). The Classified Role of UK Forests: Adaptation to National Security Threats. gabrielhemery.com.
- Hemery, G., & Petrokofsky, G. (2026). Hybrid foresight: integrating artificial intelligence and expert judgement to address strategic challenges in UK Forest resilience. Forestry: An International Journal of Forest Research, Vol 99, Issue 4, cpag066.
- Welton, G. (2011). The Impact of Russia’s 2010 Grain Export Ban. Oxfam Research Reports.
- Kelley, C.P. et al. (2015). Climate change in the Fertile Crescent and implications of the recent Syrian drought. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
- Selby, J. et al. (2017). Climate change and the Syrian civil war revisited. Political Geography.
- Ord, T. (2020). The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity. Bloomsbury.
- Cabinet Office / Joint Intelligence Organisation (2026). National Security Assessment: Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security.
- Met Office (2022). UK’s Hottest Day on Record, 19 July 2022.
- London Fire Brigade (2022). Firefighters’ heroic actions prevented fatalities on Brigade’s busiest day since World War II.
- His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (2024). Review of the summer 2024 disorder.
- Lloyd’s List Intelligence (2026). Red Sea Brief, various editions, July–August 2026.
- Met Office (2026). Summer 2026 provisional statistics, September 2026.
- Copernicus Climate Change Service (2026). August 2026 Climate Bulletin.
- Sinnett, D. (2026). Surveyors must act now to avoid ecosystem collapse. RICS Land Journal, 13 August 2026.
- Office for National Statistics (2024). UK Natural Capital Accounts 2024.
