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Ammon News - United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called on Tuesday night for a peace deal with nature in order to bequeath to future generations a better, greener world.

Noting that “without nature, we are nothing”, Mr. Guterres declared that humanity has, for hundred of years “conducted a cacophony of chaos, played with instruments of destruction”.

The UN chief catalogued examples of this destruction, from deforestation and desertification; to the poisoning of the environment by chemicals and pesticides, which is degrading land, making it harder to feed the growing global population.

However, a UN report released that year, showed that not a single target had been fully met. Meanwhile, the planet is experiencing its largest loss of life since the dinosaur era ended: one million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction.

He pointed also to the degradation of the Ocean, which is accelerating the destruction of life-sustaining coral reefs and other marine ecosystems - directly affecting those communities that depend on the ocean for their livelihoods.

Mr. Guterres took aim at multinational corporations which, he said, are “filling their bank accounts while emptying our world of its natural gifts,” and making ecosystems “playthings of profit,” and condemned the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a tiny number of mega-rich individuals.

This phenomenon, asserted the UN chief, works against nature and the real interests of the majority: “the deluded dreams of billionaires aside, there is no Planet B.”

Continuing his excoriating attack, Mr. Guterres described humanity as “a weapon of mass extinction” which is “treating nature like a toilet”, and “committing suicide by proxy”, a reference to the human cost associated with the loss of nature and biodiversity.

The answer, Mr. Guterres suggested, could lie in a global biodiversity agreement that tackles the drivers of biodiversity decline – land and sea-use change, over exploitation of species, climate change, pollution, and invasive non-native species – by addressing root causes such as harmful subsidies, misdirected investment, unsustainable food systems, and wider patterns of consumption and production.