Christiana Figueres

Sustainability speaker Christiana Figueres stands in a category of her own: a Costa Rican diplomat who did what virtually no one believed possible — forging a binding climate agreement among 195 sovereign nations. As Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) from 2010 to 2016, she inherited the wreckage of the failed Copenhagen summit and transformed it into the most consequential environmental accord in history: the 2015 Paris Agreement, committing the world to limiting global warming to well below 2°C.

Her path to that moment was shaped by decades of hands-on engagement with both the science and the politics of sustainability. The daughter of Costa Rican President José Figueres Ferrer, she studied anthropology at Swarthmore College — conducting fieldwork in indigenous communities in Costa Rica and rural Samoa — before earning a degree in social anthropology from the London School of Economics. She went on to lead the Center for Sustainable Development of the Americas, build key coalitions around the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, and serve as a senior advisor to governments and corporations across Latin America. In 2001, National Geographic recognized her with its Hero for the Planet Award.

At the UNFCCC, Figueres pioneered a radically inclusive approach to climate diplomacy — reaching beyond governments to engage corporations, faith groups, scientists, civil society, and financial institutions simultaneously. The result was a form of collaborative multilateralism that had never been attempted at that scale. Nature magazine named her the single most influential person in science for 2015; Foreign Policy named her a Global Thinker that same year. She was Costa Rica’s official nominee for UN Secretary General in 2016.

Stubborn Optimism in Action

Since leaving the UN, Figueres has continued to accelerate global climate action through multiple platforms. She co-founded Global Optimism, an organization driving systemic change through what she calls “stubborn optimism” — the disciplined choice to act from possibility rather than despair. She launched Mission 2025, a global initiative that mobilized hundreds of companies and organizations, including IKEA and Unilever, to push for more ambitious national emissions targets ahead of the critical COP cycle. Her bestselling book, The Future We Choose: The Stubborn Optimist’s Guide to the Climate Crisis (co-authored with Tom Rivett-Carnac), has been praised by Yuval Noah Harari and Sir Richard Branson as essential reading. Her weekly podcast, Outrage + Optimism, reaches a global audience of leaders, policymakers, and changemakers. She holds honorary doctorates from Yale, Georgetown, the University of Massachusetts, and the University of Edinburgh, and sits on multiple executive and advisory boards.

As a speaker, Christiana Figueres delivers something that very few people on earth are qualified to offer: the lived experience of making the impossible happen. Senior audiences — from boardrooms to government summits — leave her sessions not just informed about the urgency of climate action, but genuinely convinced that decisive, optimistic leadership is both necessary and possible. Her keynotes weave together geopolitical insight, personal narrative, and practical frameworks for leading through complexity — making her one of the most compelling voices on the global stage today.