The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis

Figueres was born in Costa Rica in 1956. Her father was the president of Costa Rica three separate times, and her mother was that country’s ambassador to Israel. She has an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. After working some years for the Costa Rican government, she and her family moved the United States, where she began working on the issues of renewable energy and climate change. In 1995, she founded the Center for Sustainable Development of the Americas (CSDA), which she ran for eight years. From the mid-1990s to 2010, she was a negotiator of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, representing Costa Rica.

In 2010, six months after the Copenhagen Accord—widely seen as a failure—UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked Figueres to become the next executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Over the next five years, she worked to build consensus and bridge differences between countries. This culminated in the successful Paris Agreement of 2015, which all 195 participant countries accepted. She remained executive secretary until 2016.

In 2016, Figueres cofounded Global Optimism with Tom Rivett-Carnac. In this role, she continues the fight against climate change, as the organization encourages people and businesses to join the effort and take steps to reduce emissions and create a more sustainable future. Figueres and Rivett-Carnac also cohost Global Optimism’s podcast, “Outrage + Optimism.” Figueres is the recipient of many awards, and a number of governments have honored her work: She was awarded the Legion of Honour of France in 2015, inducted into Kyoto’s Earth Hall of Fame in 2019, and made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2022. In 2019, she received both the Edinburgh Medal and the Dan David Prize, and in 2020, she was awarded the Sydney Peace Foundation’s Gold Medal for Human Rights as well as the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award. She has also received honorary degrees from many universities, including Yale.