In Montreal, Canada, the U.N. Biodiversity Conference, COP15, kicked off this week with a stark warning from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

Secretary-General António Guterres: “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, and ultimately we are committing suicide by proxy, because the loss of nature and biodiversity comes with a steep human cost, a cost we measure in lost jobs, hunger, diseases and deaths.”

Indigenous and environmental activists disrupted a speech by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, holding up a banner that read “Indigenous genocide = ecocide. To save biodiversity, stop invading our lands.”

Meanwhile, a new report by Friends of the Earth reveals corporate interests have steered the writing of the Convention on Biological Diversity, an international conservation treaty.