The 2009 Copenhagen Accord failed to become a robust international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases because negotiations fell apart. After that fiasco, the prevailing view was that international agreement to reduce greenhouse gases was a pipe dream. There were so many countries, with so many conflicting needs and wants, how could they ever strike a deal? Then Christiana Figueres stepped into the role of executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. She was determined to use collaborative diplomacy to make the impossible possible.
Figueres and her allies identified the complex stumbling blocks for the different global stakeholders and found ways to dismantle them. Under her leadership, thousands of people around the world worked to find common ground, and a momentum of goodwill swelled. As a result of their work, the Paris Climate Accords were signed in 2016.
The goal of this historic treaty was to mitigate the effects of climate change as much as possible by keeping the rise in global surface temperature to no more than 3.6°F above preindustrial levels. To achieve this temperature—or better—the agreement outlined that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by approximately 50 percent by 2030, and that net zero should be reached by the middle of the twenty-first century.
“To me, optimism is a choice. We have to be optimistic in the sense that we have to be able to dig into our internal capacity to be constructive agents of change.”
Now, almost ten years since the signing, the Paris Climate Accords still stand as the roadmap to address the worst impacts of climate change. “What’s painful,” says Figueres, “is that although the roadmap exists, you don’t see too many governments, companies, communities, or individuals following that roadmap. Most of these stakeholders are walking, or should I say crawling, in the right direction, but no one is doing it at the speed and scale that it has to be done.”
Meanwhile, the effects of climate change are already here. Season after season, we’re hit with catastrophic storms and floods, fires and heatwaves—coming at us faster and faster. Does Figueres believe that humanity will turn this ship around?
“To me, optimism is a choice,” she says. “We have to be optimistic in the sense that we have to be able to dig into our internal capacity to be constructive agents of change. Optimism is a courageous choice, a difficult choice. And it’s one we have to make every single day, because the opposite is frankly unthinkable.”
There are concrete actions that we—as individuals—can take right now to move toward decarbonization, Figueres asserts, and Buddhist practice and teachings can support us on this path.
Christiana Figueres was born in 1956, the daughter of José Figueres Ferrer, three-time president of Costa Rica, and Costa Rican diplomat Karen Olsen Beck. Figueres studied anthropology in the U.S. and England and then began her own public service career as minster counselor at the embassy of Costa Rica in Germany. But it wasn’t until she had children that Figueres pivoted her career to focus on climate change. “My generation is handing over a severely depleted planet to future generations,” she explains. “I cannot do that to my daughters.”
From 1995 to 2010, Figueres represented Costa Rica as its negotiator for the United Nations Convention on Climate Change. There she created critical strategies for developing support for climate change actions from developing countries and chaired multiple international negotiations. Then Figueres started her first term as executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Immediately, she advocated for a shift away from the top-down logic of previous negotiations to a bottom-up logic that embraced national self-interest in the context of scientific climate projections.
Each year of her tenure as executive secretary, Figueres led the UN Climate Change Secretariat’s delivery of annual global negotiation sessions—from Cancun in 2010 to Lima in 2014. With each conference, she played a pivotal role in incrementally laying the ground for establishing the regulatory framework that would later be universally agreed upon in 2015.
But at the same time, Figueres was in the midst of a marital crisis. How was she supposed to hold the process of international negotiations on climate change when she was in such deep pain that she was having suicidal thoughts? This scared her, so she reached out to a friend, and he asked what she needed to help her cope. On a hunch, she answered, “Buddhism,” though she knew nothing about it.
The two Costa Rican friends puzzled over how to spell the word in English so they could google it. (In Spanish, “Buddhism” has one D and no H.) Once they had that figured out, the search engine brought up “Plum Village.” Figueres learned this was a Buddhist practice center in France, but that there was also a branch in Germany, where she was based at the time.
The community was right in the middle of their Christmas–New Year retreat and not open to additional guests. Figueres sent them a message and, as she puts it, “negotiated with them” to let her in. She ended up staying for a week.
The Plum Village tradition was established by the Vietnamese Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) who is affectionately known as Thay. Figueres immediately resonated with his teachings because, as she explains it, he was able to crystallize very deep truths in very simple terms.
“I’d been crying myself to sleep every single night for a year,” she says. “And I thought, I don’t have any tears left. What am I going to do?” Then Figueres heard Thich Nhat Hanh’s teaching, “The tears I shed yesterday have become rain,” and she began to see that her tears could literally and figuratively be transformed into water, the substance of life without which nothing can grow. Understanding that transformation is possible was groundbreaking for her.
“Yes, I was in deep pain,” Figueres realized, “but I didn’t have to stay there. I could transform it into compassion, awareness, understanding. Not that I did that in a week, but at least I saw the possibility.
“By the time I left, I was definitely not through the crisis, because that took several years, but I was at least capable of being more mindful about my thoughts and actions—and capable of going back to work.”
Today, Figueres goes to Plum Village whenever she needs to recharge her spiritual batteries—and to help her in her life’s work to protect the world against climate change. Buddhist teachings, she’s come to realize, have great potential for supporting people as they face the challenges that are part and parcel of the climate crisis.
With oceans rising, fires burning, and people being displaced, it’s easy to get carried away by anger and despair. But getting carried away like that is miserable. “It’s not good for our mental health, and it doesn’t help address climate change,” says Figueres. “What Thay taught me is that we should not squelch those emotions. We have to embrace whatever emotions come up, but we also can’t let them take control,” she says.
As Thich Nhat Hanh taught, we all have myriad seeds of potential inside us. We have those that can grow into beautiful plants, like love and wisdom. At the same time, we have seeds, such as those of anger and jealousy, that grow into suffering.
“We have a choice about which inner seeds we water,” says Figueres. “This is a moment in which we have to face the pain that we’re all in and, at the same time, cultivate a culture of caring—for ourselves, each other, and the planet.”
According to Figueres, although we’ve damaged and destroyed so much, it’s still possible to regenerate both ourselves and the planet. “The more we damage the planet, the more we damage humanity,” says Figueres. “The more we regenerate the planet, the more we regenerate humanity. That sense of interbeing, of interdependence, is fundamental to Thay’s teachings and is fundamental to addressing climate change.
“We have to understand that we are not separate, because the moment we accept separateness—the idea that we as individuals are separate from our surrounding world—then we begin to feel very small. We begin to feel like we don’t have any possibility to do anything that is constructive.
“We are nature, and nature is us,” Figueres continues. “And that gives us the portal through which we can understand that regenerating ourselves is the first step toward regenerating nature. Regenerating ourselves has to do with being mindful about which seeds inside of us we’re watering. If we’re watering only the seeds of anger and hate, that leads to certain actions out there in the world. If we’re watering the seeds of compassion and caring, that leads to very different actions. We have to understand that our way of being is just as important, if not more so, than what we’re doing. Focusing on our way of being is the way to impact what we do.”
In 2021, Figueres released The Future We Choose, which she cowrote with former Buddhist monk Tom Rivett-Carnac. In this book from Vintage (Penguin), the authors unpack two possible scenarios for life on earth in 2050. The first scenario—which is grim—is what it will look like if we fail to achieve the Paris Agreement’s climate targets. The second, more hopeful scenario describes what life will be like if we decide to live in a regenerative world that has net-zero carbon emissions.
So, what’s preventing us from choosing the second scenario, a livable future? “It’s not technology,” says Figueres. “Technology has been developed and is competitive. And it’s not a lack of knowledge on policy, because we know what policies work. It’s our mindset. We have a collective mindset that’s anchored in the past—in past technologies, logics, inequalities, and behaviors. We’ve not been able to pull up that anchor so that we can sprint toward a different future, and that is human. It’s very human to stay with the status quo, but we can’t do that anymore. We have to understand that what we used to think was our comfort zone is now a terrible discomfort. Nature is reminding us of that every single day with many different occurrences around the world. We have to take a ‘can-do’ mindset of agency, a mindset of possibility, and then we have to put the grit and determination behind that mindset to get the work done in a timely fashion.”
Figueres and Rivett-Carnac are cofounders of Global Optimism, which works with some of the largest companies in the world to support their decarbonization efforts. As she explains it, the largest companies in the world have the largest carbon footprints. That means they have enormous potential to reduce emissions.
Paul Dickinson, founder of the Carbon Disclosure Project, has teamed up with Figueres and Rivett-Carnac to cohost a podcast. Called “Outrage + Optimism,” it explores climate change through the lens of technology and spirituality, art and food, economics and politics. As it says on their website, “We delight in progress, question greenwash, and get to grips with the difficult issues.”
When asked what individuals can do to move toward decarbonization, Figueres lists five concrete actions. “Number one,” she says, “find out what your carbon footprint is. It’s amazing that most people know what’s in their bank account but have no interest in their carbon footprint.” In the long run, she asserts, our carbon footprint will have more impact on our well-being than any bank account. And it’s easy to figure out your carbon footprint. Just go online and choose a carbon calculator from whatever NGO you trust the most. Follow the directions, and you’ll find out what your footprint is personally, or for your family, and you’ll be able to see where you are relative to other people who live in the same country.
Number two, says Figueres, figure out where you can reduce your footprint. Working with the carbon calculator, you’ll see where most of your emissions are. Whether they’re mostly in your transportation or inefficient appliances or noninsulated home, that’s where you can reduce. Make your plan to reduce emissions in order to be at one-half of your current emissions by 2030. That’s where all of us have to be.
“Thirdly, talk to friends, to family members,” Figueres says. “Be a messenger for the responsibility we all have to share. This is not the responsibility of one government or even all governments. It’s not the responsibility of one city, one community, one person. We all have to contribute, because we’ve run out of time. So, bring others on board. With your neighbors, start a little competition to see who can reduce most by the end of this year—be creative, have fun with it.
“Four, if you have savings, take a look at where those savings are. If your assets are in high carbon products or services or companies, you’re killing the planet. You’re robbing your children of their future, and you’ll lose your money, because those assets will lose their value. So, move your savings over to responsible saving.
“And finally,” Figueres concludes, “for those of us who live in democratic countries, vote. Vote for leaders who understand the crisis we’re in, and who are courageous enough to enact the policies we need.”
