08 April 2026

What would it cost the UK food system to do nothing about climate change? According to a landmark assessment by IGD, the answer is £2.6 billion a year by 2050, with a 15% increase in raw commodity costs from climate impacts alone, and the real cost to consumers likely to be significantly higher once supply chain costs are factored in. In the latest AFN webinar, IGD’s Head of Resilience Matthew Stoughton-Harris set out the financial reality of climate risk across the food supply chain, and why the industry’s current response, though growing, is not yet equal to the challenge.

Quick Take

• The UK food industry enters ‘peak resilience’, but IGD argues that the substance needs to match the rhetoric.  After a pandemic, war in Europe, record temperatures and a profitability crisis, risk has moved to the top of boardroom agendas. The shift is real, but the response so far has been more reactive than strategic.
• The UK’s fruit and vegetable supply is most exposed, and the risk is concentrated in a handful of climate-vulnerable regions. Forty per cent of horticultural imports come from Spain, Italy and Greece based on sourcing relationships built in the 1990s. Under even a moderate emissions scenario, those regions face nine times as many drought days as they did three decades ago.
• Shifting to healthier diets could actually increase the UK’s climate exposure, unless we also change where our food comes from. Eating more fruit and vegetables means importing more from the very regions most at risk. Coupling dietary transition with domestic horticulture investment is essential.
• Food is returning to the ‘top table’ of national security, but the UK lags behind its peers. Nordic countries are stockpiling grain for the first time since the Cold War; Switzerland is building strategic food reserves. The UK has no equivalent, and hidden dependencies, for critical supply chain inputs mean a geopolitical flashpoint could have severe consequences. Recent events in the middle east and subsequent impact on food underline this vulnerability.
• Businesses need to move from a scattergun approach to systematic risk assessment. IGD is developing a framework to do just that encouraging businesses to model climate exposure, map supply chain vulnerabilities, and ground resilience investment in commercial returns. But in a sector with razor-thin margins, pre-competitive collaboration and policy support are essential.

Deep Dive

The food industry enters ‘peak resilience’

Matthew Stoughton-Harris opened the webinar with an observation that anyone attending food industry events in 2026 will recognise: resilience has become the centrepiece of nearly every conference, strategy document, and boardroom conversation. He called it “peak resilience,” and while the buzzword risks losing meaning through overuse, the underlying shift is real. A global pandemic, war in Europe, three consecutive years of record temperatures and a profitability crisis halting investment across the supply chain have forced industry leaders to confront risk in ways they hadn’t before.

IGD, which is a century-old food and grocery insight organisation and charity, formalised its own resilience programme less than a year ago. That timeline, Stoughton-Harris suggested, tells you something about where industry is: aware of the challenge, but only recently treating it as a strategic priority rather than something to be absorbed and moved past. IGD’s definition of resilience goes beyond business-as-usual recovery. It frames resilience as the capacity to transform the food system, not just survive shocks, and build something healthier, more sustainable and better equipped for what’s coming.

A concentration of risk hiding in plain sight

Unlike geopolitical risk, which tends to arrive as a sudden crisis, climate change erodes the food system’s value gradually. That’s why it gets ignored, even as the cumulative cost mounts and why the headline finding from IGD’s climate risk assessment, the first of its kind for the UK food system, is so concerning. Modelling ten key commodities across three climate scenarios to 2050, IGD calculated that under business-as-usual conditions, climate change would add £2.6 billion in annual costs. Under a delayed transition scenario, the figure is still £1.4 billion. Only under a net zero pathway does the cost become negligible.

But the aggregate number masks where the risk is most acute. The UK sources 40% of its horticultural imports from Spain, Italy and Greece. These relationships were established in the 1990s, when the climate, commercial environment and UK’s EU membership all made the arrangement sensible. Under even a moderate emissions pathway, those regions will experience nine times as many drought days as they did in that decade. Devastating floods in Andalusia just weeks before the webinar, which displaced thousands and closed hundreds of roads, offered a preview of what disruption looks like.

Stoughton-Harris was blunt about the implications: moving supply chains is not as simple as relocating a farm. Routes to market, infrastructure, and labour are all embedded in current sourcing regions. Building alternatives further north, whether in the UK or in new partner countries, requires long-term planning and investment that the industry has not yet begun at scale.

There is, however, an uncomfortable silver lining. IGD’s modelling suggests that UK domestic production could become more competitive as growing conditions in the global north improve relative to southern Europe. This is not a reason for complacency because acute weather events like extreme rainfall already batter UK agriculture, but it does make the commercial case for maintaining and investing in domestic productive capacity.

The diet shift paradox

One of the webinar’s most provocative findings concerns dietary transition. Public health guidance urges greater consumption of fruit and vegetables, and the government’s healthy sales reporting requirements are designed to push the food industry in that direction. But IGD’s modelling shows that increasing fruit and vegetable intake under current sourcing patterns would actually increase the UK’s climate exposure, because it means importing more from the regions most vulnerable to drought and extreme weather.

This is not an argument against dietary change. Rather it is an argument for coupling the push for healthier diets with investment in where and how that food is produced. The question for policymakers and industry alike is whether the UK can scale up domestic horticulture, through controlled environment agriculture, reservoir investment, and planning reform, fast enough to keep pace with the dietary transition it is simultaneously trying to drive.

Food security as a pillar of national defence

Beyond climate, the webinar placed food firmly within the frame of national security, echoing and extending arguments made in Defra’s recent national security assessment of biodiversity loss. Stoughton-Harris cited Mark Carney’s Davos speech in which the Canadian Prime Minister argued that countries are developing greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals and supply chains. Nordic countries have reintroduced grain stockpiling for the first time since the Cold War. Switzerland has developed a comprehensive private-sector model for strategic food reserves.

The UK has neither. And its vulnerabilities extend into the detail of supply chains in ways that are poorly understood. A geopolitical flashpoint involving Taiwan, for example, could trigger sanctions on China, cutting off 70% of global garlic production, and more critically, access to biotin, a feed additive essential for UK dairy and sheep farming. EU data shows 96% of supply is sourced from outside the bloc, overwhelmingly from China, and the UK is likely in an even worse position, having no domestic manufacturing capacity.

Stoughton-Harris argued that if defence spending is rising towards 5% of GDP, food should be part of the equation. Food security is national security, as AFN co-lead Sarah Bridle put it in closing.

Industry is responding, but the approach is still too piecemeal

The webinar made the case that the industry is starting to take resilience seriously, but not yet systematically. Too many businesses are taking what Stoughton-Harris described as a “scattergun” approach, hoping some resilience measures work rather than prioritising through data and risk assessment. IGD’s framework, developed with consultancy 3Keel, offers a more structured path: building the information base, understanding and prioritising risks, getting governance and financing right, and then acting where the commercial returns are strongest.

The question of who pays remains unresolved. Stoughton-Harris argued that resilience should be built into the system as a standard cost, like food safety, rather than treated as a premium that consumers are expected to absorb. That requires industry to collaborate in ways it hasn’t yet, and government to create the conditions for a level playing field.

What now?

This webinar is the first in a new AFN series on food system resilience, and for AFN members the connections to our recent work are clear. The Defra national security assessment, our pathways to food crises research led by Sarah Bridle, and the Covid-19 Inquiry’s lessons on cross-government coordination all point in the same direction: the UK needs to treat food system resilience as a strategic priority, with the institutional architecture to match. Industry is beginning to make its case. Will policy keep pace?

The second webinar in the series, From Risk to Readiness, takes the next step by exploring how chronic vulnerabilities, triggers and governance failures could combine to produce a UK food crisis, and what it would take to prevent one. Watch it here.