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Christiana Figueres: a climate action force to be reckoned with

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.

The climate revolutionary Christiana Figueres blends tact, emotion and a bit of bullying to get deep emissions cuts in Paris next month. Politico By   JANOSCH DELCKER  
11/10/15,  “…….. 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…….

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……..

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……..

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……. http://www.politico.eu/article/the-climate-revolutionary-un-christina-figueres-climate-chief-cop21/

November 13, 2015 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, climate change | Leave a comment