A UN biodiversity meeting is slugging it out in Montreal

António Guterres, secretary-general of the UN, seems to spend most of his time delivering dire warnings. Recently, he has, Cassandra-like, presaged “nuclear annihilation”, a “raging food catastrophe” and “climate hell”. His speech on December 6th at the opening of the 15th conference of the parties to the UN convention on biological diversity (COP15), in Montreal, was characteristically catastrophic. In “treating nature like a toilet”, he said, “we are committing suicide by proxy”.

Healthy ecosystems purify water and help to regulate the climate by absorbing roughly half of the carbon-dioxide emissions which people generate. They also provide food (particularly fish and other seafood) and materials (particularly timber). Yet habitat-destroying changes of land use, the exploitation of resources, global warming and pollution mean that three-quarters of the land and two-thirds of the oceans are now “severely altered”, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, which assesses such matters for the UN.