Christiana Figueres

Forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy, Christiana Figueres spent six years working for the UN as the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and was one of the key architects of the Paris Agreement.

Christiana is now leading Mission 2020, a global initiative to bring “new urgency” to the “global climate conversation”. If the world is to avoid surpassing 2C by 2100, the emissions must peak before 2020 and then begin to rapidly decline – this means that the window of being able to change the course is very narrow. Private sector plays a significant role in reducing emissions and Figueres underlines the business opportunity that lies in taking climate leadership.

There is no doubt that the private sector is going to play a huge role (…) It is the private sector that has the technology, the capital, the know-how, the ingenuity to actually get us there. (Christiana Figueres)