UN Secretary-General: 'Humanity Has Become a Weapon of Mass Extinction'

Facts

At biodiversity talks in Montreal Tuesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres slammed multinational corporations for making the environment into "playthings for profit." He suggested, "With our bottomless appetite for unchecked and unequal economic growth, humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.”
"We are treating nature like a toilet," Guterres stated at the UN's COP15 summit in Montreal. He added, "And ultimately, we are committing suicide by proxy," with a resulting impact on food security, disease, and fatalities.
Delegates from across the world have gathered for the Dec. 7-19 summit to craft a 10-year framework to support forests, oceans, and species as well as the role of indigenous peoples as stewards of biodiversity.
A major draft target calls for governments to designate 30% of Earth's land and seas as protected areas by 2030.
However, some human rights activists caution that this proposal, known as "30x30" could actually encourage land grabs and perpetuate violence against indigenous communities. Per Sophie Grig of the campaign Survival International: “Up to 300 million people could be directly displaced and dispossessed. Many will be Indigenous people, who have protected their lands for millennia."
More than 1M species, especially insects, are threatened with extinction — disappearing at a rate not seen in 10M years.

Pro-establishment narrative, as provided by Climate Champions. Acting to address biodiversity loss has never been more urgent. Humanity relies on clean air, food, and a habitable climate. A terrifying one million plant and animal species are under threat of extinction. More than half of the global Gross Domestic Product, equal to $41.7 trillion, relies on healthy ecosystems. Limiting global warming to +1.5°C over baseline and meeting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals is possible if we agree to protect our fellow species.
Establishment-critical narrative, as provided by Nature. One of the urgent topics for COP15 is to set a new 10-year framework. It was no surprise that the last 10-year target was pronounced a failure by the Convention on Biological Diversity. This decade's draft proposal is just too weak. If humanity wants to meet the 30X30 target we can't afford weak, vague, toothless language — Indigenous communities, species, and ecosystems all deserve better.