COP15: the two horsemen of the apocalypse

COP15 started this week in Montreal, Canada. This is the UN’s biodiversity summit. In effect, it is an international meeting to discuss how to cope with and reduce the impact of global warming and environmental destruction on nature. As Carter Roberts, the US head of the World Wildlife Fund, put it: “It’s like two horsemen of the apocalypse — one is climate change and one is nature. They’re wound up with each other.”

“Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction and governments must end the “orgy of destruction”, the UN secretary general, António Guterres, said at the beginning of the meeting. “We are out of harmony with nature. In fact, we are playing an entirely different song. Around the world, for hundreds of years, we have conducted a cacophony of chaos, played with instruments of destruction. Deforestation and desertification are creating wastelands of once-thriving ecosystems,” he said. “Our land…