Costa Rican woman picked for U.N. climate change role
U. N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica as executive secretary of the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change to succeed Yvo de Boer.
Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector, the U.N. said in a release. Ms. Figueres has been involved in climate change negotiations since 1995, and served as a negotiator of both the U. N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol. She also served as Vice-President of the Framework from 2008 to 2009, and as a member of the executive board of the Clean Development Mechanism in 2007.
From 1995 to 2003, she was the founder and executive director of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas, a non-profit think tank for climate change policy and capacity-building. From 1994 to 1996 she served with the U. S. Export Council for Renewable Energy as director of the Technical Secretariat, Renewable Energy in the Americas.
Ms. Figueres has served on many boards of non-governmental organizations intimately involved in climate change issues, including the Winrock International and the Voluntary Carbon Standard. She has advised private-sector companies playing a leadership role in climate mitigation, including the Carbon Rating Agency.
Ms. Figueres was born in San José, Costa Rica, in 1956. She is married to Konrad von Ritter and has two daughters, Naima and Yihana.
