Climate Change

Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica has been chosen as the United Nation's top climate change official.

She will take office July 1, five months before nations meet for another round of climate change negotiations, this time in Cancun, Mexico.

Figueres will replace Yvo de Boer of the Netherlands as Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Currently she is Costa Rica's climate change negotiator, and she has been a UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol negotiator since 1995.

It is the first time that a developing country has held the post. It is also a symbolic choice. Costa Rica has set an ambitious goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2021.

Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace in Berlin said he has seen Figueres in negotiations several times.

"She seems to be a person who has courage and ambition," he told Deutsche Welle. "The success of her term will be determined by other factors, which are the political circumstances which blocked any success in Copenhagen."

Cancun negotiations

For the Cancun negotiations to be successful, Figueres will need to help bridge between developed and developing nations around the world, according to Kaiser.

"One of her biggest challenges is to move the position of the United States to get President Obama engaged in national climate legislation which helps to mitigate global warming. That's not an easy task at all," he said.

US climate negotiator Todd Stern said in a statement that Figueres was "well-qualified with a deep background in UN climate change negotiations."

De Boer resigned from his post after talks in Copenhagen last year resulted in only vague promises from nations and were generally regarded to have failed.

Author: gps/afpe
Editor: Nathan Witkop