Maybe don’t set fire to your only home

Biodiversity is essential

On 19 Jan 2026, whilst the world was distracted by news from the uncaring, extractive, imperialist and progressively unhinged hegemony, the British government quietly released its report on the essential need for biodiversity. The report is only landing with people now and like with many of these types of reports, those of us who’ve been attuned to these matters could summarise the report simply: if you burn down your only house, you’re gonna have big existential problems. The report is important because it spells things out clearly: no biodiversity means massive, existential problems and suffering for people, and all other animals too despite the report not focussing on them. 

The report, “Global biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and national security”, lists a number of findings, including three marked with an “analytical confidence rating of high”:

• Global ecosystem degradation and collapse threaten UK national security and prosperity.
• Ecosystem degradation is occurring across all regions. Every critical ecosystem is on a pathway to collapse (irreversible loss of function beyond repair).
• Critical ecosystems that support major global food production areas and impact global climate, water, and weather cycles are the most important for UK national security [including the rainforest in the Amazon and Congo, boreal forests, the Himalaya region, and South East Asia’s coral reefs and mangroves — arguably these areas are important for pretty much everyone on earth]. 

Whilst the focus is on the UK, these three points affect everyone on the planet. These aren’t localised matters because the effects of ecosystem collapse are entangled. 

This graph says it all.

The report points out:

• “[f]ood production is the most significant cause of terrestrial biodiversity loss”;
• the “UK is unable to be food self-sufficient at present, based on current diets and prices”; and 
• “a wholesale change in consumer diets would be required”.

We already knew the UK uses 85% of its farmland to feed animals. The National Food Strategy plan parts I and II released in 2020 and 2021, again by the UK government, revealed the state of things. The image below from part II depicts the amount of land used for each purpose in the UK (it’s not a map of where these things are happening – its amounts overlayed on the geographical outline of the UK). 

And globally, the situation is analogous. Animal agriculture uses the most land on Earth than any other human activity. Currently, the world uses 50% of habitable land for agriculture; 77% of that for livestock, meat & dairy. If you put all this together you cover the entirety of the American continent- north, central and south. And that livestock, meat and dairy only provide a total of 18% of global calories (See Our World In Data for all the preceding). It’s untenable 

Back to the UK, in the six years since the National Food Strategy was published, what have we done to address any of this on a systemic level? In my view, not enough, if anything at all. 

We urgently need just transition subsidies for farmers to shift from animal agriculture to cultivating plant alternatives, and facilitating true and paradigm shifting ecosystem services (not just carbon credits). These are simply not there and certainly not at sufficient levels. 

We also need large-scale education on the ethics of using animals from the position of whether we’re justified in using them in the first instance, with treatment a distant secondary position. We also need education about plant-based food, the benefits of a plant-based diet and the basics of cooking. These should all be skills and knowledge we all have like basic literacy and numeracy. 

Instead, especially in January, the media feels the need to fill its pages countering the already-anaemic Veganuary and with shallow analysis of “death of veganism” pieces (which I won’t link to because I won’t facilitate clicks to that nonsense). Further salt in the wound, Nicholas Carter writes “out of 10,696 U.S. climate articles (2022-2025) only ~30% even mention meat and animal agriculture (and many of those are industry PR & greenwashing). Even fewer articles (~1%) mention dietary change, arguable the best overarching action for planetary health”. I don’t know if there are equivalent stats for the UK and I’m willing to bet they’d be similar. 

On an individual level, because systemic change is absent, some activists continue to push narratives of reduction and flexible eating in the hopes someday nonvegans will become vegan? Continue to eat fewer animal products? Persuading an unidentified and unspecified group? I don’t believe persuasion comes at the expense of those animals whose products they will eat. Those are real lives even when we don’t see them. I’m unwilling to “compromise down” and let them die whilst simultaneously compromising the ethical integrity of those who are advocating for them. If the person you’re trying to persuade doesn’t understand the moral and ethical implications and sees the advocate making wholesale concessions of the group they’re representing, then persuasion will never result in profound and lasting change.

The Global biodiversity loss report concludes these are the actions we need to halt and reverse biodiversity loss:

Lasting change is what we need if we want to have a liveable future. But even in these solutions the authors can’t bring themselves to talk about consumption of animal products, the ghost of which haunts each one. We all need to do better and have the courage of our convictions; the stakes are too big otherwise.