The
climate revolutionary
Christiana
Figueres is trying to shame and prod the world toward deep emissions
cuts in Paris next month.
By JANOSCH DELCKER
11/10/15, 7:08 PM CET
BERLIN — In May of
last year, Christiana Figueres came up to the Arctic archipelago of
Svalbard. The U.N. climate chief was there to see the Norwegian
government-run global seed vault, a kind of Noah’s Ark of most crop
samples, preserved near the North Pole in case of environmental
catastrophe that signals Norway’s good green intentions.
Instead, she seized
on a working coal pit nearby, leading her to pull Norway’s
environment minister aside and tell her: “Look, I am sorry. I need
to warn you. In my dealing with the press, I am going to speak about
this. And I will call for the closing of coal in Norway,” a tough
message for a country she has seen as one of her closest allies.
That blend of tact,
emotion and a bit of bullying is what the rest of the world can
expect from the executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at next month’s COP21 climate talks in
Paris.
The petite Costa
Rican anthropologist-turned-diplomat with short brown-hair and
striking eyes — one blue and one hazel — is the public face of
the effort to strike a deal that seeks to address global warming. She
travels the world, occasionally becoming so moved while giving
speeches that she wells up, in her campaign to bring home the
seriousness of the threat facing the world.
As the Norwegians
discovered in Svalbard, the world shouldn’t expect only praise for
steps taken so far to combat climate change. Figueres will be
demanding it do still more because to her, what’s on offer isn’t
enough.
“I am the daughter
of a revolutionary and I feel very comfortable with revolutions,”
Figueres said at a climate conference last month in Oslo.
As a child, she
watched her father, José “Don Pepe” Figueres Ferrer, a
three-time president of Costa Rica, use the force of his personality
to push through one of Latin America’s most successful social
transformations. In 1948, eight years before she was born, he led an
armed revolt, and followed up by abolishing the military, giving
women the vote and setting up a social welfare state.
Her vision of a
climate revolution foresees pressure to speed up the ongoing shift
away from fossil fuels, the most widely used and cheapest energy
source on earth since man learned to make fire.
“For a long time,
it’s been very clear to me that society and the global economy has
been evolving and will continue to evolve towards low carbon,”
Figueres said during a recent lunch with POLITICO. “It’s the
natural evolution of fuels. When you look back at how we started with
wood and charcoal and coal, then gas, and then renewables, you can
see a constant decrease of carbon value and a constant increase in
efficiency of burning.”
Paris blueprint
This conference
takes a different approach than past climate summits. The Kyoto
protocol signed in 1997 in Japan committed countries to cut their
carbon dioxide emissions. The U.S. didn’t ratify the accord and
Canada abandoned it, leaving the EU as the only large developed
economy that stuck to the emissions goals enshrined in Kyoto.
This time, countries
are putting forward their own pledges of how much they plan to cut
their carbon dioxide output ahead of the summit. In the jargon of
climate diplomacy, these promises are called Intended Nationally
Determined Contributions, or INDCs. The idea is that this will be
something countries are actually committed to doing, unlike with
Kyoto.
So far 156 of the
195 countries attending the COP21 have submitted INDCs covering more
than 90 percent of global emissions. The catch? Even if implemented,
the U.N. says those reductions won’t stop the world from warming by
more than 2 degrees Celsius by 2100, the level the world body
considers the threshold beyond which climate change could have
devastating consequences.
That’s something
Figueres recognizes. One of her tasks is to manage expectations.
“If any press
person comes to Paris and all of the sudden says ‘I just discovered
something — Eureka! — Paris is not putting us on the 2 degree
path,’ I will chop off the head of this journalist, because I’ve
been saying it for two years,” she said in Oslo.
Any agreement in
Paris, Figueres said, will have many weaknesses. Her goal is more
realistic: to realize that the 2-degree target won’t be hit right
away, but to get the world’s countries to agree to revisit their
commitments every five years, steadily ramping up their greenhouse
gas reductions over time.
As Paris gets
closer, her tone is becoming more cautious. In September she said
there will be a legally binding deal, it just won’t punish
countries that fail to meet the mark. By October she played down the
legally binding aspect and said the voluntary emissions pledges are,
in fact, a more effective way of dealing with climate change.
Just the bully
pulpit
The shift from a
one-off deal to an ongoing process would make the hyper-energetic
Figueres, who is 59, a key figure in climate diplomacy long into the
future; trying to herd the cats of NGOs, energy companies, investment
funds, politicians, scientists and ordinary people to get a consensus
on policies to address global warming.
In reality, she has
very little real power besides her bully pulpit. She knew that when
she took the position five years ago, which is why she has devoted
her time to trying to build both public pressure and cobble together
a broad coalition for a deal in Paris.
Her first effort at
changing the tone was in her own office.
When she joined the
U.N. climate secretariat in 2010, having earlier been a member of
Costa Rica’s climate negotiating team, the organization’s Bonn
headquarters had the atmosphere of a “trash bin,” she said. The
2009 COP conference in Copenhagen ended with no binding agreement and
no commitments to cut greenhouse gases.
Many of the
secretariat’s workers, who had devoted years of their lives to
getting a Copenhagen deal, were devastated by the failure.
The first thing
Figueres did in 2010 was to keep Richard Kinley, a Canadian who
joined the secretariat in 1993, as her deputy.
“You have to work
with the forces of an institution and not against them. It was clear
to me that Richard represented a lot of those forces,” she said,
turning to a martial arts metaphor. “You use the energy that is
coming at you and you move it to another direction, but you don’t
stand in the way of it, you don’t try to fight it.”
Kinley promised
Figueres to stay for another year. In 2015, he’s still in office.
“My partner in crime for a long time,” Figueres said.
She said her next
step was to re-motivate her staff. Figueres brought a stack of index
cards to her first meeting. She asked every employee to write down
the changes they’d like to see so everyone would come to work with
a smile.
Back in her office,
she spread the cards over the floor and started with the easy things:
making drinkable water available, or redoing the bathrooms and the
kitchens. Later, she got to more complicated tasks. It took her and
her team around a year to get through the whole stack.
Fluid societies
The strategy behind
her “smile project” is the same one she’s using when building
her climate coalition — break down a problem into manageable
bite-sized bits and build a consensus for change.
Financial executives
speak about how, in the middle of meetings, while talking about the
finer points of some financial mechanism, the climate chief would
change gears and ask them, “are you okay?” or “are you in need
of support?”
“It’s very
rare,” Rachel Kyte, the World Bank’s climate change envoy, said
in an interview. “It’s human. It’s the whole person. She’s
interested in the whole of you. From that, you become colleagues, and
then you become friends, and then, you become comrades.”
Besides her famous
father, another crucial influence on Figueres was Steven Piker, her
anthropology professor at Swarthmore College in the late 1970s. At a
time when the discipline still regarded societies as static entities,
Piker encouraged his students to think about them as changing and
evolving organisms.
She learned from him
that “the direction, scale, and speed of change in society is
determined by man,” she said.
For her, that means
that a shift away from fossil fuels to highly efficient renewables is
a natural one. The problem, she said, is that the transition is
happening too slowly to stop catastrophic climate change.
“We can’t wait
for that evolution to occur in a natural timing. The science of
climate is constantly reminding us that we only have 5 to 10, maybe
15 years maximum to make huge, huge changes in investment into
infrastructure, particularly energy infrastructure.”
The push away from
fossil fuels, she added, “has to be accelerated by intentional
policy decisions, which is not the way the industrial revolution
occurred.”
The business case
for green
As advanced
economies move away from industry to services and information, and
cars and factories get cleaner, the world is seeing a “decoupling
GDP from GHG,” or global greenhouse gas emissions, as she put it.
In 2014, carbon emissions were flat while the world economy grew. The
trend is most evident in rich nations. Since 1991, for example,
Sweden’s economy has grown by 58 percent while emissions have
fallen by 23 percent.
That market-driven
shift to cleaner energy is making Figueres’ job easier. When she
talks to business, she’s already pushing at an open door. Some
investors — such as Norway’s $900 billion sovereign wealth fund
generated by oil and gas exports — are getting out of coal, in the
belief that its days are numbered.
The message that
tackling climate change makes economic sense is one that Figueres has
been taking around the world.
Last year she was in
Montreal to address a network of international investors,
representing about $60 trillion in assets, who support the UN’s
Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI). These principles are
intended to get business to take into account environmental, social
and other non-economic factors in their investments. Addressing the
audience with her typical “my friends,” she tried to rope them
into joining her cause by asking them to use their influence and
power to sway their home governments.
“Have your CEOs
march into the minister of finance and explain the disruption and the
risk that the global economy would face if we do not get an ambitious
agreement in Paris,” Figueres said.
Business greeted her
call with sustained applause.
“At our
conferences, I’ve never seen anyone getting standing ovations,”
said Fiona Reynolds, managing director at PRI.
Cozy with the coal
lobby
Getting an effective
deal in Paris also means changing the minds of those invested in
traditional energy. Countries like Poland have fought hard within the
EU to preserve the role of coal, which generates almost 90 percent of
the country’s electricity. Warsaw maintains Poland is too poor to
give up the cheap but dirty fuel.
In the fall of 2013,
she heard a coal summit was planned in the Polish capital to coincide
with a Warsaw climate change conference. She asked to be invited, and
the World Coal Association agreed.
NGOs were outraged
at her decision to venture into the maw of the coal lobby.
“There was a big
demonstration in front of the building and on the roof,” she said.
Inside, she said she
felt a hostile atmosphere, but she stepped in front of the audience
of about 200 coal lobbyists and told them they had “the opportunity
to be part of the worldwide climate solution” by switching off old
coal power plants.
To her surprise,
when she was done, the lobbyists applauded. “I expected either dead
silence or rotten tomatoes being thrown my way,” she said.
Despite the
applause, Poland continues to be a vociferous defender of coal.
Figueres’ cajoling
diplomacy can only go so far. Far bigger economic and technological
forces govern the way countries approach energy, from worries about
getting stranded with coal assets to the still high costs associated
with producing renewable energy. Even a deal at COP21, like in Kyoto,
will not solve the emissions problem.
Her attempt to stop
coal mining in Norway last year is instructive. Figueres turned up in
Svalbard just three months after Store Norsk, Norway’s state owned
coal company, announced the opening of the new Lunckefjell coal mine
on the island.
That mine has since
been temporarily shuttered. But the company blamed collapsing world
coal prices for the decision, not Figueres’ shaming words. Another
coal mine is still open on the island.
This article was
first published on POLITICO Pro.
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