The UK National Emergency Briefing: What Was Said on Nature, Food Systems and Finance?
At the National Emergency Briefing, the transition to away from animal-based diets towards plant-rich diets was repeatedly emphasised as critical to both mitigate the climate and nature crises as well as to protect against its many negative outcomes.
Read on to learn more about what the briefing said on the food transition, the role of banks and the important role you can play to drive change.
What Was the UK National Emergency Briefing on Climate & Nature?
The UK National Emergency Briefing on Climate and Nature was held at Westminster Central Hall on 27 November 2025. It brought together leading scientists and policy experts to inform MPs, policymakers, and civic leaders about the rapidly escalating risks posed by climate change and ecological decline. The event was designed to provide an unfiltered assessment of threats to national security, food supply, health, and the economy- and to clarify the urgent, systemic solutions required.
Food Systems Under Threat
The briefing highlighted how increasingly extreme weather - droughts, floods, and heat waves - are destabilising global and local food production, with the UK witnessing three of its five worst cereal harvests on record just this decade. Import dependency, especially from climate-vulnerable areas like the Mediterranean, further amplifies this risk. About a third of 2023 food price inflation was driven by increasingly common weather shocks. As Professor Paul Behrens from the University of Oxford noted:
"Empty supermarket shelves, people queuing for hours for food, protests and civil unrest... For generations, a stable climate has given us reliable harvests. But that era, as we've heard, is gone. We are facing an increasingly chaotic system."
This erosion of food security is directly linked to the impacts of industrial animal agriculture, loss of nature, and climate breakdown.
Animal Agriculture: Unravelling Resilience
Animal agriculture occupies around 85% of UK agricultural land but delivers disproportionate harm, Professor Behrens said, continuing to explain that:
"[It] is damaging the very foundations of our food security. It's a large driver of the UK's greenhouse gas emissions, drives catastrophic habitat loss, pollutes our water, pollutes our air, depletes our fresh water, drives antimicrobial resistance, and creates the conditions for the emergence of new pandemics... the system that feeds us is actually undermining what we depend upon."
Beyond environment and climate, the structure of animal agriculture undermines rural livelihoods. As farmers depend on a stable climate and natural services for their very livelihood, by worsening the climate and nature crises farmers this food system is driving the very issues that harm its ongoing viability, such as flooding, extreme drought and failing crop yields.
Plant-Rich and Plant-Based Diets: Practical Solutions
The expert consensus was clear: shifting to healthy, plant-rich diets is the single biggest lever for resilient food systems and nature recovery. Policy proposals include:
• Reducing meat and dairy consumption to occasional servings (e.g., a red meat burger every two weeks, a chicken breast weekly, modest dairy)
• Repurposing large areas of farmland from livestock to carbon-rich landscapes, nature restoration, diversified crops, and sustainable employment
• Supporting farmers in the transition, ensuring fair payment for nature-friendly land stewardship
A shift to plant-rich diets would deliver sweeping benefits:
• 60% reduction in agricultural emissions
• Sparing an area almost the size of Scotland for nature recovery and climate mitigation
• Improved flood resilience, water quality, and public health
• Greater food self-sufficiency and reduced reliance on volatile imports
• Financial gains for farmers who can shift away from loss-making livestock toward climate and nature-positive production
As Behrens summarised:
"Plant-rich diets... give us win-wins across every dimension. We'd reduce our agricultural emissions about 60%. We'd spare an area almost the size of Scotland across the UK... It would mean more nature, storing huge amounts of carbon, helping to meet our climate and nature targets, improving our flood resilience, and creating healthier diets and rural jobs."
“The Danes have seen the way the wind is blowing in agriculture. And they're taking the same approach with a plant-rich action plan, investing in plants along the food supply chain from farmers to chefs. and they're aiming to spur growth and make billions in plant-rich exports.
Professor Hugh Montgomery, Director of the Centre for Human Health at University College London, similarly underlined that shifting towards plant‑based and plant‑rich diets is not a fringe lifestyle choice but a core public health and climate intervention.
He explained that current high levels of meat and dairy consumption drive heart disease, cancer and obesity while fuelling emissions, air pollution and ecosystem damage through intensive livestock production.
Moving to predominantly plant‑based eating patterns would, he made clear, simultaneously cut NHS costs, reduce mortality, and free up land for nature restoration and carbon sequestration, making it one of the few measures that “wins three times over” for health, climate and the economy.
Finance and Policy: Unlocking Change, Tackling Factory Farming
The briefing called out the financial system's role in perpetuating systemic risk -banks and insurers continue to finance activities that degrade ecosystems and undermine resilience, including industrial livestock farming. Nature-related risks are now seen as core threats to UK GDP and financial stability.
Public and private finance must be redirected toward food system transformation and nature recovery. Environmental land management schemes can catalyse this shift, but require stable, multi-year budgets and clear incentives. Nathalie Seddon, Professor of Biodiversity at the University of Oxford, called for the Bank of England to stress-test nature-related risks, and for transparent disclosure by businesses as part of market reform:
"We are quite literally subsidizing systemic risk.... Our economic system is unraveling the web of life it depends on by subsidizing pollution, rewarding short-term extraction, and discounting the future."
Professor Hugh Montgomery emphasised that:
“If we make moves to the WHO recommended diet, the plant-based diet, we get longer lives, lower emissions, and enormous cash savings. And if you just look at the contribution to obesity, if we fix that, that would save this country 126 billion pounds a year. That's enough to take 12% off the base rate of income tax.”
Policy Levers That MPs Need to Take
• Reform food policies to prioritise climate-resilient, nature-positive production
• Support a national transition to plant-rich diets through public awareness, incentives, and infrastructure
• Redirect finance to reward restoration over extraction; end harmful subsidies
• Align health, food, nature, and finance policy for integrated, systemic change
For those working at the intersection of factory farming, nature, and finance, the briefing underscores that transforming our food system and accelerating the shift to plant-rich diets is both a necessity and an opportunity. This transition is foundational for a resilient, prosperous, and secure UK and will deliver cascading benefits for people, nature, and the economy.
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