Friday, November 27, 2015

Christiana Figueres: The Woman Tasked with Saving the World from Global Warming

by Fiona Harvey via the guardian

The UN climate chief is confident that the Paris summit can make history and produce a landmark deal to limit future carbon emissions – but any success depends on her pivotal role


The offices of the UN’s climate change body in Bonn have glorious views over a pretty stretch of the Rhine river, looking out on grasslands and splendid old and new buildings. Just a short distance away is the historic campus most famous for being where the Marshall plan was signed after the second world war.
That plan, which channelled billions in American aid to rebuild European economies, was instrumental in creating modern Europe, and redrawing the global economy. Instead of the punitive measures and reparations inflicted on Germany in the Versailles treaty, the Marshall plan offered healing and financial support – a message of hope, not fear.
Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate change chief, has a task just as great as the architects of that plan. She is in charge of the world’s response to global warming, a threat potentially more catastrophic than any disaster yet seen, but one which is so slow-burning that governments and the public have been able largely to ignore it for more than three decades since scientists began to prove incontrovertibly the dangers that greenhouse gas emissions pose to our planet’s stability.
On Monday, governments will meet in Paris at a make-or-break conference in an attempt to forge a new global treaty, hopefully as effective and far-reaching as the Marshall plan, that would limit future carbon emissions and bring financial assistance to the poor who will be worst-hit by the effects of warming.

High stakes but little historical progress

The stakes could scarcely be higher. It is now more than 20 years since governments made their first joint attempts at controlling emissions and dealing with climate change. Since then emissions have continued to rise strongly in nearly every year, the exception being those scarred by financial crisis. In 1992, when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was signed, binding countries to avoid dangerous levels of warming, the carbon content of our atmosphere was about 356 parts per million (ppm), most of that poured into the air since the Industrial Revolution. Now, it stands at 398ppm – not far short of the 450ppm that scientists estimate as the threshold beyond which our climate will change drastically and irrevocably, bringing extremes of weather, floods, droughts, heatwaves, and rendering swaths of the globe virtually uninhabitable.
The history of international efforts on climate change has so far been one of ineffectual and ignored treaties, unseemly wranglings over which nations should bear the greatest “burden” – as if saving the only planet we have can be so described – and political grandstanding laced with vicious recriminations. Progress, if measured in carbon output, has been nil.
Figueres is deeply aware of all this. Born into a politically well-connected Costa Rican family, she is the daughter of the man who led his country’s transition to democracy and served three times as its president, and after training as an anthropologist has spent her life in public service. As a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team from 1995, she helped write the Kyoto protocol and subsequent agreements.
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