This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Experts in climate, nature, health, national security, and financial risk have joined forces to call for a more integrated approach to government climate and nature risk assessments. In a commentary published in Nature Climate Change, they warn that conflicting advice can give policymakers very different pictures of the severity of the risks ahead, making it harder to judge how seriously to act and how much to spend.
The call comes after a summer that was, provisionally, the U.K.'s hottest on record, and that ended with almost three-quarters of England in drought. July 2026 was England's driest July since at least 1836, with 10% of average rainfall. This led to garden hose bans covering around 30 million people, over 1,100 wildfires, and winter wheat, oat, and spring barley harvests estimated to be up to 19% below their five-year average.
Deciding how to prepare for climate and nature risks, and how much to spend, draws on two approaches developed for very different purposes. National security assessments consider reasonable worst-case scenarios, while economic modeling typically focuses on central estimates and cost-benefit calculations. Both inform decisions on fiscal risk, public spending, adaptation, food and security, yet governments generally have no common framework for reconciling them.
Using a reasonable worst-case approach, a U.K. national security assessment published in January 2026 concluded with high confidence that global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten U.K. security and prosperity. It warned that the world is already experiencing crop failures, intensified natural disasters, and infectious disease outbreaks, and that "every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse." Meanwhile, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), which advises Parliament on fiscal sustainability, bases its climate damage estimates on central scenarios rather than reasonable worst cases and can imply that economic consequences are more manageable. In 2024, the OBR estimated that climate damage would leave U.K.
GDP around 5% lower in a scenario where global temperatures rise to just under 3°C by 2100. Its July 2025 assessment increased that to around 8%, while acknowledging that some potentially severe risks remain difficult to quantify. The authors say the problem is not unique to the U.K.
In its 2023 Climate Economic and Fiscal Assessment, New Zealand's Treasury reported that its modeling suggested the New Zealand economy is "relatively resilient" to more frequent droughts and storms, while the country's 2023 defense assessment named climate change as one of the two principal challenges to its defense interests. Both fed the same government's decisions on spending and preparedness, with no shared framework for integrating advice. Paul Behrens, a professor at the Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, said, "Climate risks don't happen in isolation.
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