UN picks Costa Rican Figueres as new climate chief

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Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica will be the new U.N. climate chief to head stalled international talks on how to contain the world's greenhouse gas emissions, the United Nations announced on Monday.Figueres, 53, will take over from Dutchman Yvo de Boer as head of the U.N. climate change secretariat in July.She beat fellow short-listed candidate former South African environment minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk to a role meant to rally global agreement on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after a disappointing summit in Copenhagen in December.Van Schalkwyk is currently minister for tourism in the South African government."Ms. Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector," U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.The scale of Figueres' task is underscored by a Copenhagen summit where 120 world leaders failed to reach a binding deal, pledging instead to mobilize $30 billion from 2010-2012 to help poor countries deal with droughts and floods, and to try to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to a meeting in Mexico that begins in late November.Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting also to fall short of a binding deal, looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto. The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.GOOD FOR BUSINESSFigueres has been a member of the Costa Rican climate negotiating team since 1995 and has held many senior posts in the U.N. climate process. Her father, Jose Figueres Ferrer, was president of Costa Rica three times."If they wanted a technical bureaucrat, she's probably as good as you'll get," a source close to the matter said.Business and those involved in the carbon market would welcome Figueres, said Andrei Marcu, head of regulatory and policy affairs at oil trading firm Mercuria, and a business advocate at the U.N. talks."If true, this is a great challenge for her, and from a business point of view, she has been willing to listen in the past and we hope she will continue to do so."Figueres has chaired talks to increase transparency in the global carbon offset market under Kyoto, which delivers about $6.5 billion finance annually to help developing countries cut greenhouse gas emissions.One source said the small island developing states -- among those most at risk from climate change -- argued strongly for Figueres, saying they wanted someone from a smaller nation.Costa Rica has one of the world's most environmentally friendly policies, including a strong focus on ecotourism and a long-term goal of becoming "carbon neutral," under which industrial emissions would be soaked up by forests."She has been negotiator for a country that aims to become carbon-neutral by 2021. This is what we need on the global stage," said Wendel Trio, Greenpeace International climate policy coordinator.(Additional reporting by David Fogarty in Singapore, Alister Doyle in Oslo and Gerard Wynn in London; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

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