UK Project Forecasts Future of ‘Militias’, ‘Feudal’ Scotland, Over Climate Change

A project headed up by two government bodies has forecasted that climate change may result in the emergence of ‘militias’ and a ‘feudal’ Scotland.

Jointly led by the Met Office and UK Research and Innovation, a project looking to examine Britain’s future struggles over climate change has predicted the rise of ‘militias’, as well as a ‘feudal’ Scotland due to the crisis.

A number of scenarios also include reference to the collapse of Britain’s socialised health system, the NHS, with one even suggesting that an “egalitarian” UK would rejoin the EU sometime after 2070.

Uncovered by the Daily Mail on Saturday, the “Shared Socio-economic Pathways” project outlines five future scenarios facing the UK, produced to “help answer key questions about the country’s resilience to climate change.”

While some of the scenarios are less alarmist, such as scenarios two and five, others predict futures not unlike a dystopian Sci-Fi novel.

Scenario three, titled “Regional Rivalry” predicts the UK government collapsing completely as a result of climate-related issues, with bands of militias requisitioning arms in order to keep the peace.

The scenario also predicts Scotland breaking away from the rest of the UK in 2040, with a clan system “based on a feudal system reminiscent of the Middle Ages” emerging sometime around 2070 after the independent Scottish state also collapses.

Meanwhile, scenario four illustrates a UK completely dominated by business interests, dividing the country between a very wealthy elite and an extremely poor underclass.

Divisions in the latter half of the century get so bad in this scenario that military conscription is reintroduced so the elite can export criminality outside the state.

By contrast, the most ‘optimistic’ scenario for the UK involves rejoining “a progressive and expanded” EU, while the UK adopts a more federalist system, moving power away from Westminster.

Doomsday predictions are hardly new when it comes to climate change, with the U.N. warning last year of “climate chaos” should last year’s climate summit in Glasgow have failed.

Bjorn Lomborg, an expert on climate and president of the Copenhagen Consensus, criticised doomsday scenarios in a Wall Street Journal article published last year.

“It’s easy to construct climate disasters”, Lomborg said. “You just find a current, disconcerting trend and project it into the future, while ignoring everything humanity could do to adapt”.

An article in Scientific American also made similar criticisms of such scenarios, claiming that humanity will be able to easily accommodate the gradual effects of climate change, and so any apocalyptic scenarios attributed to the phenomenon are false.

Despite this, the Daily Mail reports that a government spokesman for the Met Office, one of the government bodies that are leading the project which commissioned the future scenarios, has defended the work produced.

“The Shared Socio-Economic Pathways project is important in order to understand climate risk and resilience as climate change and socio-economic factors are highly linked.” the publication reports the spokesman as saying.

“It is just one project as part of a wider programme of science research funded by the UK Government’s Strategic Priorities Fund on UK climate resilience,” they continue. “These include research programmes to protect the environment and communities from the effects of climate change and to support a move to a low carbon economy.”