Humanity has become a "weapon of mass extinction" and it is time to end our "war on nature", UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned on Tuesday, calling on countries to take courageous decisions monitoring of COP15 on biodiversity.
"With our boundless appetite for uncontrolled and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction", he hammered during the curtain-raiser of this conference in Montreal, which he sees as " our chance to stop this orgy of destruction".
Since taking office in 2017, Antonio Guterres, former Portuguese Prime Minister, has made climate change his priority.
His fiery denunciations at the solemn opening of the COP15 meeting show that the fate of threatened plants and animals and natural environments - an interconnected crisis - is close to his heart.
Considerable challenges for COP15
He spoke in the wake of the Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, whose intervention was interrupted by the tambourines of a dozen representatives of a local indigenous people.
"Genocide of the natives = ecocide", "To save biodiversity, stop invading our lands", proclaimed their banner, brandished for a few minutes to the applause of part of the room, before they were escorted into the calm, towards the exit.
Read alsoBiodiversity: 150,000 to 260,000 animal and plant species are already extinct
The challenges facing COP15 are considerable: one million species are threatened with extinction, a third of the land is seriously degraded and fertile soils are disappearing, while pollution and climate change are accelerating the degradation of the oceans.
Chemicals, plastics and air pollution are choking land, water and air, while global warming from burning fossil fuels is causing climate chaos - from heat waves and wildfires to droughts and floods.
“We are committing suicide by proxy”
More than 190 countries are meeting from December 7 to 19 to try to seal a ten-year pact for nature and thus avoid a sixth mass extinction.
But the outcome of the negotiations, covering around twenty objectives intended to safeguard ecosystems by 2030, remains uncertain.
"Today we are not in harmony with nature, on the contrary we are playing a very different melody", a "cacophony of chaos played with instruments of destruction", summed up the UN Secretary General.
“And in the end, we kill ourselves by proxy,” he added, with repercussions for jobs, hunger, disease and death.
Economic losses due to ecosystem degradation, meanwhile, are estimated at $3 trillion per year from 2030.
But if the scientific observation is little discussed, the points of friction remain numerous between the members of the Convention for Biological Diversity (CBD) of the UN (195 States and the European Union, but without the United States, however observers influential).
The issue of funding at stake
Among the twenty objectives under discussion, the flagship ambition, nicknamed 30 x 30, aims to place at least 30% of the land and seas of the globe under minimum legal protection by 2030. Against respectively 17% and 10% in the previous agreement of 2010.
It will also discuss harmful subsidies to fishing and agriculture, the fight against invasive species and the reduction of pesticides.
But once again, the question of the financing of these measures could be a sticking point: developing countries asking for the creation of a fund, like the one decided for the climate.
And the lack of political leadership could be felt: outside the Prime Minister