Nature loss is being pushed out of the environmental margins and into the centre of financial risk. In a new Government Actuary's Department update, officials highlighted a fresh report from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries that argues policymakers, investors and regulators can no longer afford to treat biodiversity decline as a secondary concern. The report, Tipping into the Wild Unknown, was co-authored by Georgina Bedenham, Head of Climate Risk and Disaster Risk Finance at GAD, and sits within the IFoA's Planetary Solvency series. Its message is clear: damage to the natural world is not only an ecological problem. It is a direct threat to economic stability, public wellbeing and the systems that keep daily life functioning.

The IFoA frames nature as critical infrastructure, not a backdrop. Healthy ecosystems support food production, water supplies, public health, climate regulation and the wider economy. When those systems weaken, the effects do not stay in forests, rivers or coastlines. They show up in supply shortages, rising costs, insurance losses and weaker resilience across communities. That is why the report matters beyond the actuarial profession. Climate risk has slowly won a place in mainstream modelling, stress testing and boardroom discussions. Nature risk, by contrast, is still often missing from the scenarios used by governments, regulators and financial institutions. Eco Current readers will recognise the danger in that gap: what is not measured is too often ignored until the bill arrives.

The report points to several risks that are already materialising through food systems. Soil degradation can erode yields over time. Water stress can tighten production and raise competition between agriculture, industry and households. Pollinator decline threatens crops that depend on insects to reproduce, adding more pressure to already fragile supply chains. These are not distant warnings. The IFoA notes that breadbasket failures and trade disruption could trigger sharp price swings and wider economic instability. For households, that can mean higher food bills. For governments, it can feed inflation and public pressure. For businesses, it can turn once-reliable sourcing routes into repeated points of failure.

The report also connects nature loss to public health in a way that is hard to dismiss. Deforestation and land-use change increase the chance of animal-to-human disease spillover, raising the risk of future zoonotic outbreaks. COVID-19 remains the clearest recent reminder that environmental disruption can carry a heavy human and economic cost. Looking further ahead, the authors warn about ecosystem tipping points that may be irreversible on human timescales. Coral reef collapse would strip away protection for marine biodiversity, fisheries and coastal communities. Pollinator collapse would reach deep into farming and food security. Once those thresholds are crossed, recovery is uncertain, slow or in some cases impossible within a generation.

One of the report's strongest arguments is that climate-only modelling is no longer fit for purpose. Biodiversity loss and climate change interact constantly: damaged ecosystems store less carbon, weakened soils and forests reduce resilience, and warming in turn places even more stress on species and habitats. Treating one without the other leaves decision-makers with an incomplete picture of risk. That matters because nature loss does not stop at environmental indicators. The IFoA says it can affect inflation, supply chains, health outcomes, credit risk and market risk. In plain terms, the issue reaches from crop failures and medicine supply to lending decisions and pension fund exposure. This is what makes the report feel timely rather than theoretical.

Georgina Bedenham says the actuarial profession now needs to work with emerging biodiversity metrics and quantification tools, while also accepting that numbers alone will not capture every danger. The report calls for qualitative and narrative approaches to sit alongside traditional modelling, especially where uncertainty is high and the consequences of inaction are severe. That is a useful shift for the wider finance sector too. Banks, insurers and public bodies do not need perfect data before they act. They can begin by mapping how their assets, supply chains and long-term liabilities depend on healthy ecosystems. They can test where water stress, soil decline or deforestation could hit costs and performance. They can also stop treating nature-related risk as a niche sustainability issue and start handling it as standard economic due diligence.

There is a practical lesson here for policymakers as much as for markets. Protecting ecosystems is not simply about conservation targets; it is also about keeping food systems stable, reducing disease risk and lowering future shocks to the economy. A better risk framework would connect environmental protection with fiscal resilience, public health planning and long-term investment rules. That is the hopeful edge in an otherwise sobering report. The warning is serious, but the route forward is visible: bring nature into mainstream decision-making, improve the tools, and act before disruption hardens into permanent loss. Bedenham is discussing the report in the latest episode of The Actuary podcast, but the conversation now needs to move well beyond the profession that first raised the alarm.