When ecological risk becomes a planning assumption: reading the National Security Assessment with care

This isn’t activism, it’s duty of care: What three recent reports tell us about climate change, young people, and responsibility in education: PART 4

In the previous post, I argued that schools are not neutral systems, and that the way responsibility is framed matters for safeguarding as much as it does for sustainability. This post widens the lens again, on the back of a quitely released government report.

On 20 January 2026, the UK government released a National Security Assessment on global biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse. It received little public attention, and almost none in education spaces.

That’s understandable. National security documents are easy to misread, easy to over‑interpret, and easy to instrumentalise in ways that generate fear rather than clarity. So it’s important to approach this one carefully.

What this assessment actually is

This document is not a political speech or a manifesto. It is an internal‑facing risk assessment, produced using the same analytical frameworks applied to ‘terrorism’, pandemics, cyber‑security, and geopolitical instability. It’s main purpose is to inform planning under uncertainty. The assessment states – with high analytical confidence – that:

• global biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are already underway
• these processes pose risks to food security, water availability, health, economic stability, and geopolitical relations
• without major intervention, those risks are likely to intensify beyond 2050

It also explicitly acknowledges that there are significant uncertainty around timelines and that there is variation in regional exposure with multiple interacting drivers and feedback loops. This kind of language matters. It is deliberately cautious, probabilistic, and bounded.

It is just as important to name what the assessment does not do, despite what some elements of the popular press are framing. It does not declare imminent global collapse and claim inevitability. That’s important to note because although the situation is dire (I can attest from working with climate science data on a regular basis), doomism is paralysing and prevents the work needing to be done. I believe that social systems can adapt, and so it’s important to note that this assesment does not say they can’t. There is no call to emergency powers, no “last chance” rhetoric, and no demand for immediate behavioural change. Anyone claiming otherwise has not read the document carefully.

Why this still matters for education

At this point, some readers may reasonably ask: If this isn’t a directive, and it doesn’t mention schools, why are we talking about it at all? In earlier parts of this series, there is nothing to assign responsibility to children or educators, nor to instruct schools or education systems to act. The answer lies in a single concept: foreseeability.

Safeguarding frameworks do not require certainty. They deal in known risks, emerging risks, cumulative harm and contextual vulnerability.

When a government formally recognises a risk as systemic, long‑term, cross‑sectoral, and plausible within the lifetimes of today’s children, then that risk enters the territory of reasonable professional awareness. Not panic. Not prediction. Awareness.

Planning assumptions change the ethical ground

The national security assessment is framed to allow for planning. Security planning does not assume worst‑case outcomes will occur. It assumes:

• systems must be able to cope if pressures increase
• resilience depends on understanding as much as infrastructure
• literacy reduces vulnerability

This has direct, if quiet, implications for anyone working with young people. Safeguarding has always involved preparing children to live in contexts that adults cannot fully control such as online spaces, public health risks (a global pandemic, for instance), social instability and economic stress.

Ecological risk now sits alongside these – not as an apocalyptic certainty, but as part of the background conditions shaping young people’s futures.

Joining this to the earlier evidence

At this point in the series, we have already established three things:

1. Children’s emotional connection to nature is strong and meaningful, and access to protective experiences is unequal.
2. Schools are materially implicated in climate‑related systems, largely through factors children do not control.
3. Ecological instability is now formally recognised as a long‑term risk at national level.

None of these points require exaggeration to be concerning. Importantly, they also point away from individual blame and towards institutional responsibility and professional care.

The role of literacy here is defensive, not activist

One of the key mistakes in climate education debates is assuming that literacy is about motivating action. And while long-time readers would, with substaintive cause, label me as a ‘climate activist’, I am keenly aware that this is a loaded term. So framing climate literacy through a safeguarding lens allows us to step back and appreciate that it is just as often about:

• reducing fear
• countering misinformation
• preventing catastrophic thinking
• enabling proportionate response

When risks are acknowledged but poorly understood, uncertainty breeds anxiety. The national security assessment itself emphasises uncertainty – but it does so in a way that models how uncertainty should be handled: explicitly, transparently, and without drama. That is a valuable lesson for education.

There will be people who want to use documents like this to justify that telling children the future is hopeless, and that justifying despair is simply ‘being honest’. We cannot demand emotional resilience without offering or recieving support. That would be a profound misuse of the evidence.

Reading this assessment responsibly means recognising that it strengthens the case for care, not catastrophe, and so it supports literacy, not alarm, emphasising preparation, not prophecy. Safeguarding is fundamentally about holding complexity without collapsing into fear.

This does not turn teachers into security actors

I want to draw a firm boundary here. Nothing about this assessment implies that schools are responsible for national security and that educators should act as emergency planners beyond the scope of local ’emergency preparedness’ as part of the Keeping Children Safe in Education statutory guidence. And when we talk about building adaptation and resilience in schools and the education sector, we don’t mean that children should be prepared for collapse. That would be unreasonable and unethical.

What is reasonable is expecting professionals to be aware when risks that shape children’s lives have moved from speculation into formal recognition.

This post may feel different to the last two. That’s because it operates at a different level – not lived experience, not institutional practice, but societal context. And context matters for safeguarding. We already ask education to respond thoughtfully to:

• online harms that didn’t exist 30 years ago
• mental‑health pressures shaped by modern life
• democratic literacy in a fragmented media environment

Ecological risk now sits alongside these as part of the world children are navigating. Ignoring that doesn’t protect young people. It isolates them.

Where this leaves us

Taken together, the evidence does not point towards panic or prescription. It points towards careful responsibility. The final post in this series will draw these strands together and ask the simplest, hardest question of all:

If climate literacy is increasingly about safeguarding, what does reasonable professional practice actually look like – across roles, not just subjects?

Because this is no longer about whether we “hold back” or “speak up”. It’s about how we do our jobs well, in good faith, in a changing landscape.

Next: Part 5 – Climate literacy as safeguarding – what ‘reasonable responsibility’ looks like in practice

Subscribe to be alerted when the next post in the series is published.