Christiana Figueres, a veteran climate change negotiator from Costa Rica, has been appointed as the United Nation’s head climate change negotiator. She replaces Yvo de Boer, who is leaving after four years as head of the United Nations’s Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) for a job at KPMG.
Figueres is a surprise choice. Observers had predicted UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon would appoint South African Tourism Minister Marthinus Van Schalkwyk to the Bonn, Germany-based post, probably one of the more high profile positions in the vast UN bureaucracy– see full press release.
In the wake of the Copenhagen disappointment, as the executive secretary of the UNFCCC, Figueres will have to work hard to rehabilitate the UN-system as viable organ, able to deliver a comprehensive, global climate change treaty. Large emitting countries, like China or India, which also talk for the developing world, are turning their back on the UN negotiation framework in favor of looser, self-regulating agreements.
Figueres takes over at the UNFCCC a little more than five months before the next UN Climate Change Conference in Cancun this November. She’s confident that strong agreements will come out of Cancun. She says: “I would say that there is an opportunity to take some of the elements that are in the Copenhagen accord, such as fast-track financing, such as the whole thing with deforestation, such as a framework for adaptation, and begin to focus on delivery.”
But who is Christiana Figueres? A member of the Costa Rican elite, she is 53 and was educated in England and the U.S. She’s been a member of Costa Rica’s negotiating team on climate change since 1995. Before that, in 1994 she was the director of the technical secretariat of the Renewable Energy in the Americas program. She also was the executive director of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, was three times president of Costa Rica.
Figueres is “well liked and a competent negotiator,” an unnamed UN source tells Fast Company’s Addy Dugdale. “If they wanted a technical bureaucrat, she’s probably as good as you’ll get,” the source adds.