Christiana Figueres, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change, led the climate negotiations that birthed the landmark Paris Agreement. Yet, in November 2024, after the 29th climate talks held in Azerbaijan, Figueres was among 22 scientists who wrote to the U.N. calling for “a fundamental overhaul of the COP.”
On a recent episode of Mongabay’s weekly podcast called Newscast, co-host Rachel Donald asks Figueres whether she thinks the Paris Agreement has failed, especially since average warming in 2024 went 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels.
“No, the Paris Agreement has not failed,” Figueres tells Donald.
Figueres adds that we shouldn’t just focus on the climate negotiations, but rather what the Paris Agreement’s effect has been on the global economy. “And then we can see that actually, perhaps we have more progress than we thought,” she says.
In the European Union, Figueres says renewable energy sources such as wind and solar have reached a share of 30% of electricity generation and are overtaking fossil fuels for the first time. The same goes for the Global South, she adds, where “solar and wind generation has been growing 23% per year for the last five years.”
Figueres tells Donald that renewable energy has had to start from the ground up. However, “we are at that point… Just to take last year’s data, we actually invested almost two times as much into renewable energy generation than we did into new fossil fuels,” she says. “So it is not correct that we are actually investing more into oil and gas. We’re actually investing every year less and less.”
While having stricter expiration dates for fossil fuels and different types of technologies would be good, its absence does not make us “stuck”, Figueres says.
“If the economy is moving in a direction toward more fossil fuels and more intensity of carbon in all aspects of the economy, then we’re in a really bad situation. But that’s not the case. The economy is moving toward decarbonization sector by sector, investment by investment, technology improvement by technology improvement,” she says.
When asked about where people can find the optimism that she has, Figueres says it’s something that she “cultivate[s] as a choice.”
She adds that optimism is not about naivety or ignoring what is happening around us. It’s also not just celebrating successes.
“Optimism for me is much closer to conviction and determination,” she tells Donald. “I make a deliberate choice every morning to say I’m going to dedicate my time, my effort, my conviction, my energy, my agency to collectively contribute to all of those efforts that are really, sincerely, deeply trying to make the difference, trying to make us bend the curve where we have to.”
Listen to the podcast: Former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres remains optimistic despite disappointing COP process
Banner image of a wind energy farm by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
