Christiana Figueres (53), the new executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change does not expect a genuine international agreement on combating global warming to be agreed upon within her lifetime.
Christiana Figueres (53), the new executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change does not expect a genuine international agreement on combating global warming to be agreed upon within her lifetime.
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“I don’t believe we’ll have a final agreement on climate in my lifetime,” said Figueres, who takes over in July, when current secretary Yves de Boer’s four-year term ends.
Figueres, diplomat from Costa Rica, maintained the ‘trust deficit’, with each nation pursuing its own interests, would not allow a ‘sound climate deal’ to be hammered out at the meeting in South Africa, scheduled for 2011, let alone at the forthcoming meeting in Cancun, Mexico, in December this year.
The current 10-day-long negotiations at Bonn too have failed to achieve any significant breakthrough.
An instance of the trust deficit Figueres referred to was evident on Wednesday when oil producing countries Saudi Arabia and Kuwait blocked a proposal for preparing a technical report on options available to limit global temperature rise by 2050 to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. “I can't understand what they fear from the report,” said Ronald Jumeau, UN Ambassador for Seychelles, an island nation vulnerable to temperature changes.
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Figueres said negotiations were a gradual process to accommodate varying political realities. “I continue to be confident that governments will meet this challenge, for the simple reason that humanity must meet the challenge," said Figueres.
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Figueres said negotiations were a gradual process to accommodate varying political realities. “I continue to be confident that governments will meet this challenge, for the simple reason that humanity must meet the challenge," said Figueres.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
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