49. Christiana Figueres: COP28, Costa Rica, and surviving the climate crisis

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1:32Welcome to The Rest is Politics Leading with me, Rory Stewart. And me, Ernest Campbell. And we are very lucky to have with us today, Cristiana Figueres, who is joining us from Costa Rica, but joining us at a very interesting time, because we are now just at the beginning of the COP Summit, which is launching in Dubai. All the delegates are beginning to gather. And Cristiana Figueres is an absolutely central figure to the bringing together of global climate agreements. She was central to the whole UN process for many years and was one of the chief architects of the breakthrough in Paris, which led to a lot of the agreements in terms of climate targets.

2:15She is a Costa Rican diplomat. She comes from a very distinguished Costa Rican political family. She's multilingual. Just before we came on, she and Alistair were attempting to conduct this interview in German. Then to mock him, she then moved into Spanish, which I must say he was much less successful. And we're very, very lucky to have you with us. But I think if we can start with the most straightforward thing, which I guess is what a lot of the world is thinking about at the moment. Can you tell our listeners in basic terms, what is happening in Dubai, why it matters, what you're expecting and what you're concerned by?

2:50Okay, well, those are about seven questions, each of which would take about three and a half hours to answer. But let me start by saying thank you very much, Rory and Alistair, for inviting me on. You did introduce me as a Costa Rican diplomat. I am probably the most undiplomatic diplomat you've ever met. In any event, here we are. Yes, the beginning of the COP in Dubai, it's COP28. First of all, what is COP? COP is actually an acronym, and I hope it's the only acronym we're going to use in this conversation, but it is an acronym that stands for Conference of the Parties. It is the annual meeting of parties, as they are called, which are the national governments that are part of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

3:43And it was these nations who came together in 2015 to adopt, sign, and then bring into legal standing the Paris Agreement. So same nations, now some years later, what is it, eight years later, coming together again. And this will happen every year. So COP28 in Dubai is first surprising, I would say, because this is an effort to control greenhouse gas emissions and set guardrails for the evolution of the global economy along decarbonizing path. And so it is perhaps quite surprising that it takes place in an oil and gas exporting country. And there has been much discussion about that, whether it even has the authority, the credibility, the standing to host a conference on climate change and whether there are too many oil and gas executives who are present, etc., etc.

4:53It is rather unusual, I must say. But it was the decision of that region to host it in Dubai this year. Now, what makes COP28 a little bit unusual from the other is that this is the year in which something will occur called the global stock take, which is an exercise mandated by the Paris Agreement of 2015. It is the process in which all countries have to report what they have done on their decarbonization and increasing resilience efforts, and then come up with a compounded sense of whether we are moving on the right path. But more importantly, are we doing it at the speed and scale that is required by science?

5:43And the answer to that is no. So then the second question is, now what? Now, Christiana, you said you were not diplomatic, but were you being a tad diplomatic when you used the word unusual? Did you find unusual in the UAE hosting this event? Did you perhaps mean inappropriate or potentially counterproductive? Or do you just mean unusual? No, I mean unusual because it has only happened once before when we had a COP in Qatar, which is also an oil and gas producing country. So I do mean unusual, like numerically, mathematically, statistically unusual. But you don't feel there's something fundamentally worrisome about the fact that there could be a kind of inbuilt conflict of interest about the whole thing?

6:29You're confident it can still work? It very much depends on how the president of the COP manages the situation and stewards the meeting. Let me put it this way. I was the executive secretary of the climate convention, and I had to work every year with a different COP president because they rotate every year. And the one thing that is absolutely fundamental for both the executive secretary, in my case, but everyone else before and after me and for the COP president is to be completely impartial to all political interests. It was frankly very difficult for me because I come from the wild and wonderful Costa Rica, a very, very proud country.

7:18I am a very proud citizen. I am very proud of the environmental integrity with which Costa Rica defines its policies. So I'm partial. I am partial to environmental integrity. And it was clear to me when I went to the UN to follow my role that I could not be partial to my country's position anymore, that I had to step out of that and assume my role with complete impartiality with respect to all other countries and all of their political interests and positions. The same thing has to be done by a COP president. And that is, of course, a different person every year. But in this case, the COP president is not just an Emirati citizen.

8:06He actually is also the head of Aetnok, which is the state-owned oil and gas company. That presents a major challenge. And I have said from the beginning that my concern is not that he is the oil and gas head, but rather that up until a few months ago, he had not separated himself from that position and was able to come to this challenge that he has with an impartiality that is necessary. That is the challenge. Yeah, and there were all these reports, I think, which you were commenting on saying it was like the VW scandal, pointing out that there was BBC reporting on a lot of apparent backroom meetings, which UAE were going to be doing, promoting its oil and gas industry.

8:57Can I just go to something that confuses me? Whenever you go through an airport at the moment, you see huge ads from various fossil fuel companies telling you what wonderful things they're doing and investing in renewables. But it seems as though only about 1 % of the renewable investment is coming actually from fossil fuel companies. There's an impression that they're not really making the transition that they're pretending to make. Can you explain this? What's going on? Is it simply not in their economic interest? Is there no point in them really getting into solar and the stuff that they pretend to be doing at airports?

9:31I would actually divide that into two timeframes, Rory. My sense is that at least the publicly traded, perhaps not so true for the state-owned, but the publicly traded companies, especially the European ones, were very sincerely on a path of transition from their past and current business model onto a new business model with new resources. still understanding themselves to be an energy company, which they are, but no longer dominated by the oil and gas sector, but rather moving into first a broader portfolio of energy sources and gradually more predominantly into renewables. That was true of most of these publicly traded companies until the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

10:28Very interesting, right? Because what happened there is that because oil and gas was weaponized by Russia, the prices soared, as we all witnessed, and these oil and gas companies, for nothing that they did, not because they improved their performance or, you know, nothing, absolutely nothing that they did. Their profits just went through the roof. Unprecedented profits. And then the big old dollar was just too tempting. And what did they start to do? They started to buy back shares. They started to give their shareholders larger dividends. They started to lobby against climate policies, especially in the United States, they did everything against the evolution of the energy sector, which they had been on a track before the Russian invasion.

11:31So it is really quite concerning that they are now digging in. Now, next to that, and I think it's really important to see the two effects of the Russian invasion because one, prices soared and they just dug in to their by now obsolete resources. But what is much more interesting is the fact that so many countries realized that depending on imported oil and gas is actually very, very dangerous for their national security, their national energy security. And so one, the other factor that we see is an incredible spike in the investment into renewable energies, not on the part of oil and gas, but on the part of all other actors, an investment into renewables in order to strengthen the energy independence of countries so that they do not have to depend on oil and gas.

12:32because oil and gas, let's face it, is being exported by quite a few regimes that have proven themselves to be complicated. So we've had complicated, we've had unusual. Now, listen, Christiana, let's just go back to 2015. When you were stuck there in Paris, you were executive secretary of the UN framework. You've got all these different forces. You're surrounded by lobbyists. You're surrounded by vested interests who are getting into the government delegates and getting into the campaign groups that are all around the place. How do you actually go about the process of trying to get all these countries to agree to something pretty difficult?

13:10Well, first of all, it's just recognized that the Paris Agreement was not the result of two weeks in Paris, right? It was the result of five years of work consistently and also very much of a reaction to what I call the most successful failure of the United Nations, which was the Copenhagen meeting at the end of 2009. And so I was given the responsibility to pick up the political process out of the trash can and see what I could do with it. Christiana, I'm going to interrupt just on behalf of listeners. Can you just tell us a little bit about what happened in Copenhagen and maybe a little bit of the background to that so they understand what this failure was?

13:49Oh, yes. It was, yet again, another of these yearly meetings. And it was touted to be the meeting at which the world would come together for a global agreement on climate change. And there was a lot riding on that. In fact, for those working on this, Copenhagen was no longer Copenhagen. It was Hopenhaegen with an H. because there was so much hope that this was going to be the moment and the time at which the world would come together. And that did not happen. But not only did it not happen, it was a disaster. The process was very, very poorly managed. Global leaders came in and had all kinds of secretive meetings.

14:33The COP president resigned and was substituted by someone else who who had no idea about UN rules. We had one, just to give you, you know, a sense of the drama there, we had one country delegate representative from Venezuela who actually stood up on her official desk that says Venezuela on it. I mean, you have to understand, right? In a UN context, all these desks, each one has a name, the country. It's a very, very formal, very exceedingly formal context. And we have this, you know, beautiful and very energetic, compelling, eloquent delegate standing on her desk, screaming to request the floor and actually doing so with such a verb, using her metal nameplate, country nameplate that she actually cut into her hand.

15:30And when she finally got the floor on behalf of the president, she was bleeding and then, you know, delivered these amazing onto all the television cameras of the world, delivered this impassioned speech about the totally failed process that she was witnessing. So I was there. You know, there are many Copenhagen survivors, as I call us. And it really marked us. It marked all of us. And Christiana, what lessons did you take from that about what you needed to do better leading into Paris? So if you were helping listeners understand, you come out of something, what are your main lessons that you're then thinking about over the next four or five years that you're going to have to fix if you're going to get a successful summit?

16:16Yeah, we actually did a third party analysis of everything that went wrong and then dedicated quite a few years to addressing each of the issues that went wrong. But in big picture, we understood that the process had to be very transparent, that there was absolutely no tolerance anymore for small meeting rooms with just a few representatives, even if those representatives had been authorized by other countries to speak for them. That was just totally gone, which gets back actually to Alistair's question about how do you get everybody to unanimously approve? The fact is that there are no voting rules in this convention.

17:00They were never agreed to. They will never agree to. We can go back down that rabbit hole, but let's just take it for a fact that there are no voting rules. So in principle, you would be able to take decisions by consensus and consensus in a strictly legal interpretation means consensus is in the hands of the person who is chairing the meeting to say, I sense that there is enough support in the room to adopt decision whatever. And we did, after Copenhagen, adopt quite a few decisions at future meetings by consensus, but with the dissent of a handful of countries. And that caused major political havoc, and in one case, legal havoc.

17:52So by the time we got to Paris, we and the secretary had decided that we would not adopt the Paris Agreement by consensus. We would do it by unanimity. that completely changes the situation that really ups the game here, because that means if one country does not agree, it does not get adopted. So we self-imposed that very high standard on ourselves. And we worked for five years. That's a huge risk. It's a huge risk. But we also thought, Alistair, give me one country that is not affected by climate change. None. Every single country is affected by climate change. Every single country can contribute in differentiated ways, for sure, but every country can and must contribute to addressing climate change.

18:39So if that is true, if both of those statements are true, therefore, we have to get to something that every country can agree to. That was not easy, and it caused a lot of drama. But in the end, we had, for the first time ever in the UN, a unanimous decision that was legally binding that affects the evolution of the global economic system. I've been to dozens of these European summits, which always seem to end in the early hours of the morning and people are exhausted. So as you say, most of the work is done in advance. Do you think these decisions can be made without these endless through the night meetings where people are kind of arguing over semicolons and whether it should be this word or that word to get to an agreement?

19:27Do you think people feel they have to go through that incredible drama and tension to make it feel like it matters? It's such a good question, Alistair. I've thought about that a lot myself. And it's certainly, you know how we're creatures of tradition and of habit, and we have these habit energies. And when I joined this process, which was way, way, way back in the early 90s, I did observe how we We've caught ourselves into the habit of that, of what you've just described, except it used to be two and three days beyond the deadline. And I, in fact, even remember the Kyoto meeting that we had in 1997 when we adopted the Kyoto Protocol, where the venue ran out of food because, you know, they just didn't expect it to go that long.

20:14But the point is that we had gotten ourselves into this habit. And that's one of the things that we really worked on to bring dial this back down to some rigor and some discipline about deadlines and also some humanity. Because honestly, these people, all of us, you know, we work in and out day in, day out. And it's incredibly it's humanly exhausting. So we did cut down the, let's call the overshoot of the time to a day, sometimes 12 hours, which was a definite improvement over the three days that we had before. Can I understand? And maybe I'd like to bring in Alistair on this, because it's also true often of very dramatic EU summits, this tendency to leave everything to the last moment, stay up till four in the morning, only craft the agreement at the last moment.

21:04Alasdair, any reflections from your point before I come back to Christiana on why this is? Why is the whole thing not sorted out in advance? Why does it always push in these crazy ways? Because I think there's a limit to what can be done until the leading politicians actually get involved. And they tend to kind of fly in, some of them very well briefed, some of them not so well briefed, some of them with a very clear, specific thing they want to pursue, others with very different, clear, specific things that they want to do. And then people like Christiana are sitting there with a big jigsaw piece, and they're worrying that any one of these leaders can remove a piece.

21:41And if they're not careful, the whole thing falls apart. And to get the pieces back together, you usually need to get the leaders in the room to fix it. Do you think that's fair, Christiana? Yeah, that's fair. Plus, you know, let's just look at the complexity. In Paris, we were negotiating 67 different issues along five parallel tracks. So, you know, it's not like you're working on one text. You're working on many different texts that cover a very wide gamut of issues. And they're all interlinked, Rory. That's the issue. They're all interlinked. It is not true that you leave something for the end.

22:14You work on this for a whole year. You're working on the text that will be adopted at the end of the year. And there is very serious work on the part of everyone. But what happens is that first you have to collectively develop a text. you try that, you know, 196 pens on one paper. So that in and of itself is rather complicated. And that's assuming that each country only has one opinion, which they don't usually do. And then you start almost trying to find the low hanging fruit. What of all of this could actually begin to move into the at least potentially theoretically approved and agreed bucket?

23:00And then you work yourself up into the more contentious issues. And those issues necessarily stay there to the end. And they are interlinked. You move one, as Alistair has said, you move one piece out and it completely changes the puzzle for everyone who is attached to that piece. And everybody's attached to different pieces. So it is a constantly moving Tetris game until it finally settles. And Christiana, in Paris, what were the three big things, the three big pieces that you wanted to try to get in place? I think the three things that make Paris very, very different from anything that came before is, number one, there is responsibility attached to every country of the world.

23:50Prior to that, there was responsibility attached only to industrialized countries because industrialized countries carry the historical responsibility for having caused climate change. And so you can understand the developing countries say, wait a minute, you guys, you caused this, you fix it up. Don't talk to us. Industrialized countries say, well, yeah, OK, maybe I'm willing to accept the fact that I caused it. But if I look into the future and I look, you know, at your development curves, I see that you're coming up in your emission curves. So we can't exempt you from something that is going to be in place for the next few decades.

24:28You need to come on board, too. And so, you know, to get to something that is fair, that recognizes historical responsibility of one group of countries, but also future responsibility of everyone, that is not an easy agreement to come to. The other thing that was quite different in the Paris Agreement is that it is based on national contributions on each country making a legally binding commitment of how much are they going to reduce over a certain period of time and then doing a monitoring and evaluation of the compliance of that. And so that was also quite different in the sense that every country had then to make public what their contributions were going to be.

25:21And the third thing, I mean, there are many things that make it quite unique. But the third thing that I would point out is that for the first time, there was a recognition that this is the responsibility not only of national governments. This is the responsibility of everyone. Subnational governments can contribute. Corporations can contribute. Financial institutions. So everybody who is not a national government have also been given a place in the contribution. Okay, quick break.

25:53Christiana, feel free to tell me to get lost when I ask this question. But we talk quite a lot on our podcast about the impact on people in public life of their contribution to public life. And I think around this time, you were going through a divorce, which is always difficult. and you were also having some struggles with your own mental health. Do you think either or both of those things were caused by the level of commitment that you needed to make to the job you were doing? I don't think so, Alistair. It's a good question. Thank you for asking it. I'm not going to tell you to get lost. It's a good question.

26:29No, I don't think so. I really think that it was the pain of my marital situation blowing up that was the cause of that. And to the contrary, actually, like I guess many people, if not most or all people, there's a huge amount of learning and growth that comes when we hit bottom and when we're in incredibly stressed situations. And I did learn a lot and I applied those learnings then to my day job. And I must say, although it was incredibly difficult to deal with my personal pain and my personal trauma while in the evenings, let's say, while during the day I'm holding this process. I am actually, in retrospect, I am grateful for the lessons that came out of that pain and feel that I am a more mature person for that and certainly much more capable of dealing with my own difficult situations.

27:35and also, Alistair, very important for me, much more empathic. Because I was in such pain and because I went through such a difficult time, I can now pretty readily put myself into the shoes of people who are going through incredible personal situations. I couldn't do that before. And I mean, to put it very clearly, I remember having been told by female friends of mine, I'm going through a divorce before this. And I just thought, oh, okay, well, they're going through a divorce. And I always said, how can I support? But it was out of my head because I had never had the experience. And when I went through the experience in the painful way that I did, all of a sudden, now when I know that there is a family that is going through this incredibly difficult situation, I am so much more capable of holding that pain and that process than I was before I went through it before.

28:37And I really am convinced that there is no way that you can put yourself in another person's shoes if you haven't worn those shoes yourself. The same goes through with the fact that I've now lost two siblings and I'm in the process of losing my third sibling. You can't understand the impact of the death of someone who you love deeply and is very, very close to you. You can't understand that unless you've been in those shoes. So I'm actually, post the drama, I'm actually quite grateful that it has made me a more empathic, a deeper person. Thank you for that. And you come from a family with a very, very strong tradition of public service.

29:21Your sister was the Costa Rican ambassador to the US, your brother was president, and most dramatically of all, your father was the president of Costa Rica in the 40s, the 50s, even in the 70s. So a very, very long period and basically created the modern state. Looking back at your father, what kind of personal cost do you think that carried in terms of the amount of time he could spend with his children, his mental health, the pressures on him while he was achieving these extraordinary things for his country. A huge cost worry. And I can tell you, you know, an anecdote that illustrates this. I must have been maybe, I don't know, six or seven, maybe eight, but not more.

29:59When my father was in an interview from a journalist who had traveled to Costa Rica to interview him about politics and economics in Latin America, why I was there, I have no idea because, of course, I understood absolutely nothing. But at the end of the interview, the journalist said, Don Pepe, which is the loving way that my father is addressed, Don Pepe, how many children do you have? And my father, without even losing, you know, a beat, he said three million. Now, three million was the population of Costa Rica at the time. Now, that is the only thing that I understood of the whole interview.

30:38you. And you can imagine for, you know, a little girl there standing behind my father's chair, I just felt a knife go through my heart. I went like, wait, what? Hold on. I expected the number six, right? Because he was married twice. He had two children in the first marriage. And then the marriage with my mother from whence came four children. So I expected six, three million. and it took me a long time to understand that my father saw himself and understood himself and is viewed today as the father of the country. You said it felt like a knife going through you. Did you ever discuss that with him either as a child or as an adult?