Christiana Figueres
Costa Rican diplomat engaged in UN
Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen (born 7 August 1956) is a Costa Rican diplomat who has led national, international and multilateral policy negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. During the next six years she worked to rebuild the global climate change negotiating process, leading to the 2015 Paris Agreement, widely recognized as a historic achievement.
Over the years Figueres has worked in the fields of climate change, technical and financial cooperation, energy, land use and sustainable development. In 2016, she was Costa Rica's candidate for the United Nations Secretary General and was an early frontrunner, but decided to withdraw after garnering insufficient support. She is a founder of the Global Optimism group, co-author of The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis (2020) along with Tom Rivett-Carnac, and co-host of the popular podcast Outrage and Optimism.
Early life
Figueres was born in San José, Costa Rica. Her father, José Figueres Ferrer, was President of Costa Rica three times. Figueres' mother, Karen Olsen Beck, served as Costa Rican Ambassador to Israel in 1982, and was a member of the Legislative Assembly from 1990 to 1994. The couple had four children.
The public source identifies “Christiana Figueres” as costa Rican diplomat engaged in UN. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Christiana, Figueres and Costa.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q518828. VIAF identifies the subject as 58630782. The Library of Congress control number is no00088944. 3 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1956, 2010, 2015 and 2016.
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This entry incorporates text from “Christiana Figueres” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.