According to the Government Actuary's Department, the new paper is a warning that nature loss should no longer be treated as a separate environmental issue. The department said Georgina Bedenham, Head of Climate Risk and Disaster Risk Finance at GAD, co-authored the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries report 'Tipping into the Wild Unknown', the latest paper in the body's Planetary Solvency series, which asks actuaries, policymakers and financial institutions to recognise nature loss as a material economic threat. For Policy Wire readers, the significance is straightforward. The argument is not simply that biodiversity matters in principle; it is that public policy, prudential supervision and financial risk assessment can misstate exposure when damage to the natural world is left outside formal analysis.
The report's starting point is that nature functions as critical infrastructure for the economy. The Government Actuary's Department summary says it supports food systems, water supply, health and climate regulation, with direct effects on economic activity. That framing matters because risk models are built around what they choose to count. While climate risk has moved further into official scenarios, the same government note says nature risk is still largely missing from the models used by governments, regulators and financial institutions. In practice, that leaves a blind spot in how resilience is assessed.
The Institute and Faculty of Actuaries paper points first to risks that are already emerging, not only distant tipping points. Soil degradation, water stress and pollinator decline are described as pressures on food systems that can affect output, prices and trade. The report also warns about sharper shocks, including failures across major crop-producing regions and disruption to trade routes. Those events matter for fiscal planning, inflation forecasts and household costs because they can move quickly through supply chains and commodity markets.
Disease risk sits within the same warning. The government release says deforestation and land-use change can increase the chance of animal-to-human disease spillover, with COVID-19 cited as a recent example of how environmental disruption can become a system-wide economic shock. That broadens the policy question beyond conservation. If nature loss affects public health, labour supply, insurance claims and credit quality, it becomes a cross-government risk issue as well as a scientific one. The co-authors describe the channels as running through inflation, supply chains, health outcomes, and credit and market risk.
Looking further ahead, the report warns that some forms of damage may be hard to reverse on human timescales. The Government Actuary's Department highlights the risk of collapse in coral reefs and pollinator populations, both of which would affect food production, coastal protection and wider economic activity. The paper argues that climate-only modelling is no longer fit for purpose because climate change and biodiversity loss interact. In policy terms, that means scenario work which tests carbon risk but ignores nature depletion may understate both the scale of possible loss and the speed at which stresses spread.
Bedenham's contribution is especially relevant for the actuarial profession. In comments published with the release, she urged actuaries to start using emerging biodiversity metrics and quantification tools, while also accepting that numerical models will not capture every exposure at this stage. She also pointed to narrative approaches as a useful companion to conventional modelling. That is a practical message for departments, supervisors and firms: uncertainty is not a reason to postpone action where the direction of risk is already clear.
The immediate policy test is whether institutions change what they monitor, disclose and stress-test. If nature loss remains outside mainstream risk frameworks, decisions on pricing, lending, insurance, public spending and resilience planning may rest on incomplete evidence. The Government Actuary's Department note presents the report as a prompt to move biodiversity from the margins of environmental debate into ordinary economic governance. Bedenham is also discussing the findings in a recent episode of The Actuary podcast, extending the message beyond the report itself and into professional practice.