Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen (born 7 August 1956) is a Costa Rican diplomat who has led national, international and multilateral policy negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. During the next six years she worked to rebuild the global climate change negotiating process, leading to the 2015 Paris Agreement, widely recognized as a historic achievement.
Over the years Figueres has worked in the fields of climate change, technical and financial cooperation, energy, land use and sustainable development. In 2016, she was Costa Rica's candidate for the United Nations Secretary General and was an early frontrunner, but decided to withdraw after garnering insufficient support. She is a founder of the Global Optimism group, co-author of The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (2020) along with Tom Rivett-Carnac, and co-host of the popular podcast Outrage and Optimism.
Early life
Figueres was born in San José, Costa Rica. Her father, José Figueres Ferrer, was President of Costa Rica three times. Figueres' mother, Karen Olsen Beck, served as Costa Rican Ambassador to Israel in 1982 and was a member of the Legislative Assembly from 1990 to 1994. The couple had four children. Figueres' older brother José Figueres Olsen, was also President of Costa Rica (1994–1998).
Growing up in La Lucha, Figueres attended the local Cecilia Orlich grammar school. She moved to the German Humboldt Schule in the capital and later graduated from Lincoln High School. She travelled to England for a year of A Level studies before entering Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1979. As part of her studies in anthropology, she lived in Bribri, Talamanca, a remote indigenous village in the Southeastern plateau of Costa Rica for one year. She then went to the London School of Economics for a master's degree in social anthropology and graduated in 1981. Figueres' daughter Naima was born in Guatemala in March 1988, and daughter Yihana was born in Washington DC in December 1989.
Early career
Figueres began her public service career as Minister Counselor at the Embassy of Costa Rica in Bonn, West Germany, from 1982 to 1985.
Returning to Costa Rica in 1987, Figueres was named Director of International Cooperation in the Ministry of Planning. There she designed and directed the negotiation of comprehensive financial and technical cooperation programs with eight European countries, and supervised the evaluation of all national technical and financial assistance requests. She served as the Chief of Staff to the Minister of Agriculture between 1988 and 1990. She supervised the execution of 22 national programs involving training, credit and marketing.
In 1989 Figueres moved with her husband to Washington DC, and for several years devoted herself to the upbringing of their two daughters. In 1994, Figueres re-entered professional life and became the Director of the Renewable Energy in the Americas (REIA) initiative, today housed at the Organization of American States (OAS).
In 1995 Figueres founded and became the executive director of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the participation of Latin American countries in the Climate Change Convention. She worked there as executive director for eight years.
International negotiator
Representing the Government of Costa Rica, Christiana Figueres was a negotiator of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change 1995–2010. In 1997 she provided critical international strategy for achieving developing country support and approval of the Kyoto Protocol and the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). From 2007 to 2009 she was Vice President of the Bureau of the Climate Convention, representing Latin America and the Caribbean. Over the years she chaired various international negotiations:
Co-chair of the Contact Group on Guidance to the CDM Executive Board: Nairobi, December 2006; Poznan, December 2008; Copenhagen, December 2009. Co-chair of the Contact Group on flexibility mechanisms for the post 2012 regime, Bonn in June 2008, Accra, Ghana in August 2008, and Poznan in December 2008. Member of the Friends of the Chair Group that negotiated the Bali Action Plan for long term cooperative action of all nations, Bali, Indonesia, December 2007.