IN Brief:
- Food-sector leaders want food resilience treated as a national security priority.
- The call follows warnings that the UK is not prepared for current climate risks.
- Proposed action includes investment in farming, water, cooling technologies, cold chain infrastructure, and logistics.
Food-sector leaders have urged the UK government to treat food resilience as a national security priority, calling for a coordinated plan to protect production, supply chains, and household access to food as climate risk intensifies.
The group brings together farmers, food businesses, trade bodies, NGOs, and academics. Its call follows the Climate Change Committee’s Well Adapted UK report, which warned that the country is not adequately prepared for the climate risks it already faces.
Extreme heat, persistent flooding, water stress, and disruption in global supply chains are already increasing pressure on the food system. Those pressures affect farming output, ingredient availability, manufacturing costs, logistics reliability, and household food prices.
A national resilience approach would place food security closer to energy security in policy and investment planning. The group wants faster action to protect UK production, strengthen supply chains, and reduce the inflationary impact of climate shocks.
That would include support for farmers moving towards more climate-resilient production systems, alongside private sector investment in water infrastructure, cooling technologies, cold chain capacity, and logistics.
Manufacturing exposure extends well beyond agricultural output. A hotter, wetter, and more volatile climate changes raw material reliability, input costs, transport routes, temperature-controlled storage, and the resilience of processing sites. Cooling, warehousing, and distribution become strategic infrastructure when disruption is more frequent.
Food-system risk is also shifting from emergency response into long-term infrastructure design. Production sites, storage networks, water access, chilled distribution, and transport connectivity all need investment before disruption arrives, not only after shortages or price spikes have already moved through the chain.
Manufacturers are already dealing with those risks through energy costs, water availability, ingredient price volatility, and transport disruption. Poor crop yields, flooded roads, heat-stressed livestock, or compromised cold-chain performance can move quickly from farm-level pressure into factory scheduling and retail availability.
A national plan would not remove climate risk from the food system, but it would give government and industry a clearer framework for deciding where investment should go first. Without that framework, resilience remains a patchwork of individual company planning, local adaptation, and supply chains expected to keep absorbing shocks.
The current level of disruption suggests that patchwork will not be enough.
