A national emergency

18 December 2025

Are our political leaders being honest with us about the seriousness of the climate crisis? Academics and wider experts at the National Emergency Briefing say ‘no’, in a sobering warning with just a sprinkling of hope attached.

Westminster Central Hall, late November 2025. Chris Packham walks on stage brandishing a phone on a long selfie stick; on the screen is a small image of planet Earth from space. “It’s the only home we’ve got”, he says.

It’s not an unusual scene, except when you consider the audience that Packham is here to address: around 1,000 civil society leaders, MPs, campaigners, influencers and A-list celebrities.

The National Emergency Briefing was convened for “10 leading scientists and other experts” to “present the latest, authoritative assessment of the climate and nature crisis, highlighting the implications for the UK and pathways forward”.

Regular readers will know that I can tend towards doominess. There’s a big part of me that thinks that between AI, growing geopolitical tensions, climate change and nature collapse – the modern four horsemen of the apocalypse, if you will – the human species is going to hell in a handcart and possibly pretty soon. But another part of me refuses to give up the belief that we have the solutions and collective intelligence at hand to course correct.

Visceral

This briefing was hands down one of the most compelling two-hour plus chunks of content I’ve ever witnessed. It validated my perspective on things but at the same time hammered home the fact that we’re so very far from where we need to be on climate and nature action (and that these are intrinsically linked to the other horsemen mentioned above). I was left deeply disturbed.

Why? Because our politics, in the nation that has given us the world-leading Climate Change Act, the independent Climate Change Committee and carbon budgets, is so impotent in this area. That our politics on climate and nature is going backwards despite the credibility of the evidence. Irrespective of what the rest of the world is doing, we should be driving forward on all fronts with hugely greater ambition; along with the small matter of staving off economic and societal collapse, there are considerable upsides to doing so. We’re still the sixth largest economy in the world and remain influential.

I heard nothing appreciably new in that hall. I’m familiar with the climate academics of course. But in combination, and with some of the strongest arguments coming from Professor Hugh Montgomery of University College London on health and Lieutenant General Richard Nugee of the government’s Defence Safety and Environment Committee on national security, the impact was visceral.

Public broadcast

This campaign (for despite its official looking, sober and formal branding, it very much is one) wrote to the prime minister calling for Westminster and the media to resist widespread fossil fuel-funded climate disinformation. It also asks that the government hold a televised national emergency briefing and a “comprehensive public engagement campaign so that everyone understands the profound risks this crisis poses to themselves and their families”.

It cited the Communications Act 2003, which requires that all public service broadcasters must inform the public on major national and international issues. And it implored that, “If delivered urgently and truthfully, with ambition matching the scale of the crisis, this will not only ensure that the public is properly informed but will also offer the protection that knowledge and preparedness bring.”

Speakers noted the recent failure of the government to publish a report by the Joint Intelligence Committee about the impact of the climate crisis on national security. They pointed to this as evidence of a lack of willingness to start a genuine national discussion about future threats and how we can navigate them.

Both Montgomery and Nugee referenced the ability of nations of the world to mobilise at pace to tackle major threats, but emphasised that preparedness and bold action are critical to saving lives (especially in the health context, citing the response to Covid-19).

Language

CIWEM declared a climate and nature emergency back in 2019, as did many organisations at the time. But now, more than six years on, during which time the UK has seen two droughts, extensive wildfires, storms and floods, and while extreme weather has raged across the planet with horrific consequences, are we as a professional community still reticent to unleash the ‘e’ word?

Our presidential theme this year, of ‘green roots, growing prosperity’ masks with a polite title our presidents’ genuine frustration at the toxic narrative around growth and nature pushed by our prime minister and chancellor. We champion ‘A Fresh Water Future’ but were rightly challenged at our latest conference to instead talk about a “freshwater emergency”.

Is this professional community – of experts in possession of so many of the solutions that need to be rolled out at fantastically faster pace – willing to collectively switch up its language to another level? Not just on the risks but also on the solutions? There are useful pointers on messaging from the likes of Climate Outreach. And in terms of lifestyle measures you can adopt, we have supportive information here.

But there are many experts who clearly feel that in the face of a “cascade of serious societal impacts” it’s time to stop pulling punches and that the only entity who can mobilise action at the necessary scale – and afford the public the time it needs to prepare – is our government.

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We’d like to hear your views on the tone of our messaging around the climate and nature emergency. Let us know at policy@ciwem.org.

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Alastair Chisholm is director of policy at CIWEM