Christiana Figueres: Building a Lasting Legacy in Global Climate Action at the UN and Beyond | E116

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The very purpose of my life is to turn over a better planet to future generations, not a worse planet.

Christiana Figueris.

She was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where she steered the global effort on the Paris Agreement.

I really wanted to bequeath to my children a love of nature.

I wanted to take them to this one national park in Costa Rica where I had fallen in love with this little golden toad.

And to my absolute pain, I found out that the species had gone extinct.

And I thought, surely there are many other species that are disappearing.

And I want to know why.

Because I want them to live in a better planet.

And this was an indication that I was turning over a worse planet to them.

And I said, no way, I can't do that.

You are credited as one of the architects of the Paris Agreement.

What happened behind the scenes?

First of all,

Christiana Figueroas is an international recognized leader on climate change.

She was executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, where she steered the global effort on the Paris Agreement.

Today, she is the co-founder of Global Optimism.

She is a podcaster.

She has a book.

She's a co-founder of The Future We Choose.

Christiana, I'm super excited to speak with you.

Thanks, Ilana.

Really exciting.

I kind of suspect this is going to be a fun conversation.

Let's see.

It will.

It will.

Because I am going to take you back in time to Costa Rica.

Your family was committed to public service from the get-go.

What was it like growing up, Christiana, and how did that shape you?

Well, it was a rather unique childhood, I must say.

I was born in the presidential house.

My father was president for the

second time, and then he became three times president later on.

So it was a very odd childhood, not full of play and fun and playground and sleeping over with your friends like everyone else.

It was very much a childhood that started even from the early age with being imprinted with service.

And at the beginning, it was helping out in the household with all of the formal things that had to happen, and then later on taking service to other realms, but very, very imprinted by both my parents actually, about

we are a privileged family because we all have very, very good education and we have risen to political influence.

And therefore, it is our responsibility to give back and to serve.

I just read a book from Maria Shriver and she talks about how hard it is and how it comes with so much responsibility to come from a family like this.

Was that your impression as well?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, totally.

I very much resonate with Maria on that because I remember from being very, very young that I was made responsible for my younger sister's education, who's six years younger than I.

That was my first responsibility because I was a pretty good student and she wasn't.

And so my mother decided it was my responsibility to make her a good student.

She resisted her entire life, nonetheless.

That was my mother's brilliant brilliant idea.

And then, when my father became president, again, many of the home functioned very much as an office, a second office for my father.

And I was put in charge of a lot of things that needed to happen: the formal dinners, the scheduling of things at home, ensuring that we had the right wine for the right food, et cetera, et cetera.

So I learned very, very quickly.

I learned protocol.

I can set a table for 12 courses perfectly.

I know my forks, my knives, my crystalware.

I'm actually pretty well trained.

Oh my God.

I learned it from Freed Woman, where you put it in everywhere.

Anyway, there's a movie.

But did that come

with hate?

Because again, the more you're at the top, or maybe your family is at the top, I assume you hear a lot of things in school.

Did that create a little bit of a thicker skin that you're using now or not necessarily?

No, I wouldn't say a thicker skin.

I also thought that it was pretty odd that other kids just went to the playground.

I thought, well, what a waste of time.

Why would you go to the playground when there's so many other important things to do?

So I definitely drank the Kool-Aid very, very young as with respect to Cerberus.

And I didn't resent it, actually.

I was in constant training, one thing after the other, and quite taken by the outside world and everything that there was to learn about the outside world.

Even to this day,

even now I have a little grandchild, but I remember when my girls were young, I couldn't play with them because I never played.

And so I had to rely on their father to play with them.

And even now, it's really difficult to get me to play a game.

really really difficult I have to like do it out of discipline you know

like force myself to play that's so funny and then you decide to go study anthropology in the US is that correct yeah my first profession was an anthropologist a little bit like you I feel like I butterflied through many many different professions I love that term I'm totally stealing that term that is a really good one okay so tell me Yeah, I decided that I wanted to be an anthropologist when I was 13 because my father took us throughout the country for his political campaigning and then when he was president for his presence in all different rural areas.

And when I went to some of the indigenous areas in Costa Rica, I just totally fell in love.

I just thought, wow, these people are.

the max.

They are so admirable.

What they do with what they have, this is absolutely fascinating and i was fascinated what was drawing you well i was fascinated by the process of change by understanding where they came from what their ancestry was what their conditions of life were two or three generations before and then this massive change accelerated change that they were going through because they were just barely being reached by electricity they still didn't have running water, but they were being reached by the cash economy, which they didn't have before.

And all of this was producing all of this excitement and tension within the communities.

And I was just fascinated by just sitting back and observing the fact that this very, very culturally rich community or communities, I ended up later living in one community for a whole year, but I was just fascinated by that process of change.

And I guess guess the question for me was, is it possible to manage change such that they can attain creature comfort, but not lose their identity?

How is that possible?

Can that be done?

But seeing this as a kid, if you will, is this also traumatizing?

Like in the sense of, here I am living here and they're living in a different place?

Or no, it just comes from how can I create a better environment?

Yeah, it wasn't traumatizing at all because my father and that had trained us very well.

We were trained to sit down on a dirt floor and drink water out of a dirty cup if that's the situation that we were in because we were traveling throughout the country or if it meant getting all dressed up and sitting at the table at a formal dinner party with a member of the royal family of somewhere.

We knew how to do that also and everything in between.

And my father just really imbued us with this deep respect for the human spirit.

Each person as an individual, as a vessel of the human spirit.

And it really didn't matter how much money that person had, what the house looked like, what the income was, completely irrelevant.

What was really important was

how do you interact with this person as a rich

representation of humanity in this moment, under these conditions?

Fascinating.

So then you decide to live in a village like that for a year, which is not literal.

It's not two days.

It's a year.

So what was that experience like?

I can totally see my daughter calling me after a week, like, get me out of here.

Well, to begin with, there were no phones, so I couldn't call anybody.

But But yeah, I made the choice because I was studying anthropology and I could choose for my bachelor's degree to write a thesis or not.

And I chose to write a thesis based on real field work, which anthropologists tend to do.

And then, of course, I went back to my love, which is the indigenous communities in Costa Rica.

I volunteered as a teacher for the Ministry of Education and I went to one of the most remote tribes.

I had never been there before.

To get there, I had to walk through three rivers, meaning literally through the river.

I had to really time it very well, not after a big rainfall, and get to this village that had no electricity, no running water, very, very basic conditions.

I slept on a wooden board.

That was it for a year.

I walked down to the river to wash the plates, plates, to get water for cooking, to brush my teeth, to wash my hair.

I actually chopped my hair off.

I had very, very long hair that went under my waist, below my waist, and I just chopped it off because it was just too complicated to take care of my hair in the river.

So the children there who had seen very few white people, they just couldn't understand what this person was with short hair and wearing long pants.

I wore long pants because I didn't know the plants when I got there and I didn't know walking through the forest which plants can I let touch me and which not.

So I wore pants, I had short hair, I really looked more like a boy than a woman.

And so for a long time, the children who I was teaching thought I was a boy or a man.

And the surprise that they got one morning when they went very early to the river and I was washing

and they saw in my body that I was a girl and they were like, what?

You are a girl.

They were just astonished.

Oh my God.

But a year like that, I'm sure it's like you can write a book only about that, but what are some of the biggest takeaways?

Yeah, I know.

I wrote my master's thesis on that.

Yeah.

Takeaways.

I think the painful piece for me that I did my best to mitigate was the fact that these children who had, as I say, no electricity, no running water, they lived under a thatched roof with no walls, no division of rooms, anything like that.

They were trying to learn Spanish, which is not their original language, from a book

that

started by saying, and I will translate from the Spanish, this is my mother.

She is making bread.

And you could see a woman in front of all of this dough rolling out the dough on a table

none of which they had ever seen they don't know what a table like that is they don't know what rolling dough on a table is the page number two said this is my father he reads the newspaper and he was sitting in a big armchair with a big lamp behind him reading the newspaper and so not only you're trying to understand the language you're trying to go like what on on earth are these Martians talking about?

You know, in a big armchair with a lamp behind him, reading a big old newspaper.

And that is my father?

No, that's definitely not my father, for sure.

Not

at all.

Wow, that's crazy.

It doesn't resonate.

So, as part of my anthropology thesis, I wrote a children's book for learning Spanish out of their own concepts with designs that made sense to them and everything so that it was culturally based on their lived experience, but it was in the Spanish language.

I can't even wrap my head around being there for a year, but hey, I have so much respect.

Ilana, one time I had a camera and I took loads of pictures, black and white.

And since I went back to the city once every three months, I had a little dark room and I developed all my pictures and I developed just hundreds and hundreds and took them back to the children because they had never seen themselves in a photograph.

So every three months I took a big pack of photographs and they were just so excited to see themselves on paper.

But one day I decided, huh, I wonder where their imagination takes them.

So I took a big old photograph of New York by night.

And after I had shown them the pictures of themselves and I always gave them the pictures to take home and they were so excited.

Then I I showed them the postcard of New York by night, and I said, What is this?

And they said, All the little stars in rows, all the little stars in rows, because

they have never seen light at night.

And when you see New York at night, that's so funny.

Now, I know,

yeah, in the buildings, right?

They're all in rows.

So they just thought it was the funniest thing that for that picture, all the little stars had gotten into.

That's incredible.

So you began your public service career, and I think you started as an embassy of Costa Rica, and then in Bonn, in Germany.

So moving between the different countries, you've been in U.S.

and Germany, et cetera.

What is that international experience giving you?

Because I can totally see how I'm piecing it all together.

I can slowly start seeing Christiana like that has created these big changes, but it's really fun to see the threads.

But take me to that embassy of Costa Rica and Bonn.

I worked as an anthropologist for a while in Fiji and in Samoa.

And then I came home and I thought, what is the best way here of being able to affect change?

in a direction that is respectful, which seems to be the mantra of my life.

And

that led me into international development.

So I worked in various different ways on international development projects, sometimes in Costa Rica at the Ministry of International Corporation, where I was dealing with countries who finance international development projects in Costa Rica.

I then, as you mentioned, went to the Costa Rican embassy in Germany because

they were one of the largest investors in international development in Costa Rica.

And so I was sent there to negotiate with the government because somehow international development is getting a little bit better.

But in those days, which was literally last century, there were just so many white elephants that these international aid agencies had crazy idea of, you know, well, let's finance, I don't know, a big, huge

bridge.

And people would go, okay, that's a good idea.

Where is the river?

Oh, well, that's irrelevant.

So

that kind of mentality, just because we have engineers who build bridges, so let's build a bridge and we'll worry about finding the river later.

I mean, I'm exaggerating a little bit, but not very much.

I understand.

That's the mentality, right?

We still do some of this, but yeah, I don't know how much of that changed, but I'm not going to go there.

But when did that passion for climate spark?

Well, the climate spark didn't start until after I was married and had my children.

And

when my children were very small, I wanted to take them to this one national park in Costa Rica where I, because I had gone there with my parents on their political campaigning, I had fallen in love with this little golden toad that was very small little toad and literally golden and especially on a moonlit night if they were in mating season it was just amazing because you could see almost like these little golden coins just jumping up and down in the forest and they were just so beautiful and that is one of the things that made me fall in love with nature and i really wanted to bequeath to my children a love of nature.

I just think that it has been so influential in my life and is so important to me now for sure.

And I really wanted them because we were no longer living in Costa Rica.

We were out, we were living in Washington, D.C.

because of their father's job.

And that wasn't enough for me.

I really wanted them to be tied and intrigued and awed by nature.

So I wanted to take them to the very same national park and to my absolute pain, I found out that the species had gone extinct.

And it went extinct exactly the same year that my second daughter was born.

So I contacted some of the scientists there and I said, what on earth?

What has happened?

And they said, well, we don't know yet.

We're studying it, but it seems that there has been a temperature rise on the surface of the forest, on the soil, and that temperature rise has caused a fungus on the skin of

those toads and it just wiped out the entire species.

And Ilana, I was just stricken and I thought, oh my God, okay, in my little life here, 30 some years, I have witnessed the disappearance, the extinction.

of one species.

What does that mean for the rest of the planet?

Surely there are many other species that are disappearing.

And I want to know why.

Because

the terms of reference that I gave to me as a mother right when the girls were born is, I will turn over a better planet than what I found.

I want them to live in a better planet.

And this was an indication that I was turning over a worse planet to them.

And I said, no, no way, I can't do that.

That does not fit into my TORs as a mother there's no way so i started finding out and very soon i landed on climate change studied myself into the topic and here i am 40 years old

when you study you go all in so you founded this center of sustainable development

and

Again, at that point, if I'm not mistaken, climate change wasn't on everybody's radar, far from it, right?

Talk to me a little bit about those early days advocacy.

Did everybody think you're crazy?

Yeah, well, because Costa Rica is a country that protects its nature so much.

As a whole, we had become aware that climate was a huge threat.

And so Costa Rica, throughout many different governments, not just my father's particular political party, but through many different administrations, we had been very consistent about learning what was going on and beginning to take national policy to protect our nature.

So I was very privileged in having been a part of that process of national policies that are enacted for that purpose.

So then when I went to live in Washington because of my husband's job, I thought, okay, if I can't work in Costa Rica now, this is the perfect opportunity to take the lessons learned from Costa Rica to the other Latin American countries.

So I founded that NGO with the purpose of taking the lessons learned on climate policy to other Latin American countries and getting them ready to participate very actively in the negotiations of the climate convention, where I was already participating as a Costa Rican negotiator.

And I could see, as I looked around the room, I'm like, well, where are the other Latin Americans?

They're not here.

And so I just decided to take it upon myself to help countries and governments and private sector in Latin America get up to speed and set up their national programs, their policies, and be better negotiators at the table.

And at that point, I'm sure you're hearing a lot of mixed remarks about you going after that or is that people are just not taking it too seriously or are they they are taking it seriously or no?

Well, in Costa Rica we always took it seriously and that was a huge privilege for me that it was national policy because it goes hand in hand with the protection of our nature.

But in the U.S.

was it already pretty common?

Totally irrelevant for me frankly.

Okay.

Totally irrelevant because I was working within the Latin American context.

Got it.

And what I really, really wanted was my colleagues, the other Latin Americans, to join me in this mission.

But also, we actually had pretty good administrations in the beginning in the United States that were eager to learn.

For example, the carbon market was basically invented by Costa Rica and Norway in exchange for carbon credits.

And then the United States learned about it and wanted to participate and entered into very interesting, original, pioneering projects with us.

So the US has not always been obstreperous about climate, actually.

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Now, back to the show.

So take me to 2009.

At that point, I think the climate change change conference in Copenhagen did not achieve the goals that people were hoping.

And I think to some extent that was a little bit of a blow to a lot of people in the space.

Can you share a little bit, where did that catch you specifically?

By that time, I was a pretty seasoned negotiator that I wasn't before when I started.

bringing my colleagues along.

All of us had been working toward a global agreement in Copenhagen.

That was the whole point of it.

And I was already so seasoned and so senior in the negotiations that I was representing the region of Latin America in something called the Bureau, which is sort of the board of directors of the Convention, if you will.

And that board of directors called the Bureau has representatives from each of the five UN regions.

So I was the Latin American representative on the Bureau, and everybody on the Bureau holds the title of Vice President of the Convention.

And when something happens to the president of the COP, should there be an emergency or whatever, the procedure calls for one of the vice presidents to step in.

And in Copenhagen, the end of 2009, there were several disasters, but one was that the Danish government had not done its homework in finding out what were the UN rules of procedure.

And

they decided to take the COP president out, which they can't do without the Bureau, and put in the president of the country who had no idea about anything, never heard the word climate change.

So that was just a total disaster.

So we had several emergencies there.

And in one of those emergencies, they called me as vice president to please chair some of these very, very difficult conversations.

Yeah, these sessions that were like tripping over landmines.

And I had never done it, but I was a pretty seasoned negotiator.

So I stepped in.

I said, okay, I've been trained for service.

This is the service that is needed.

Go for it.

And it's so interesting because I remember when I got off the podium after chairing one of these very difficult sessions, the Minister of the Environment of Costa Rica, of my own country, came up to me.

He was in the plenary.

And he said, you know, you ought to be the next executive secretary.

And I said, you are out of your mind.

You are completely out of your mind.

And he said, no, I don't think so.

Goodbye.

And he left.

And then after that very painful and disastrous conference, the then executive secretary resigned prematurely and the UN started a search.

So before the search, one of the reasons why I want to wait there for a second, Christiana, is because I think a lot of our audience are in a pivotal moment in their life.

And maybe they've been, some of them have been laid off or they had some kind of a failure in the project or the project, you know, has been eliminated or been replaced with AI or whatever it is, right?

And they're right now trying to almost like get their act together despite feeling that this was a failure or despite feeling like they're down.

Tell me for a second when you go through something like this, which you're essentially, you're put there but it was kind of bound to fail to some extent all the winds were against an agreement at that point how do you get out of this situation stronger if you will i wouldn't say any of us left copenhagen stronger i think we all left on the floor we were all traumatized by what we had seen, what we had witnessed, what we participated in.

Honestly, it was a traumatizing

So six months later, looking back at it and already in charge of the process, I went, wow, I wonder what we could learn from that if we make an effort to learn.

So we contracted a third party that had nothing to do with us.

to do an assessment of it.

Tell us everything that went wrong.

Do a really in-depth assessment.

And they came back with 300 pages.

And we went, like, oh my God.

Okay.

Let's start here.

So, with that in my hand, I remember thinking, huh, okay, with 300 pages of assessment done by someone else, so completely objective, if we're able to address at least part,

if not the majority or all of these issues, the fact is that that disaster will have been the most successful UN failure ever.

Because you're learning from it.

And that's the trick.

When you have a failure like that and you feel you're at rock bottom and you can't even pick up your head, my sense now at the ripe old age of 68 is number one, have compassion on yourself.

And give yourself the time to be on the floor and to mourn the failure and

to embrace the pain because otherwise, if we stick it under the carpet, it's just not

coming back at three in the morning.

Exactly.

So, today I know make space for it.

And

we all make mistakes.

One person makes mistakes, but especially when there are 5,000 people, that's one mistake times 5,000.

And it's fine.

Nothing lasts forever.

Everything changes constantly.

The important thing is embrace the failure and learn from it.

Before we go how you became this executive secretary in the UN, I mean, it just became amazing.

And then Paris, et cetera.

But right before that, because you didn't know that all of these good things are coming, how do you get up in the morning and decide to continue doing this again, again?

Do you feel like you needed other people around you to help you?

motivate you or did you numb the pain by doing different things?

What's your coping mechanism?

No, it definitely didn't numb the pain.

I don't recommend that.

As a completely newly minted executive secretary, I went to my first press conference and I had done a lot of study to figure out what is the secretariat and what is the responsibility and what do we do and what we don't do and da da da da.

So I thought, okay, maybe, maybe I'm ready for my first press conference.

And so I went in and answered questions as best as I could.

But then toward the end, this male journalist, and I remember that he was a man and I really wish I could remember who he was because today I would thank him profusely.

But he said to me at the end of it, he said, Mrs.

Figueres, do you actually think that a global agreement will ever be possible?

And without stopping to think, which I don't recommend, I do recommend stopping stopping to think, especially in a press conference.

But without stopping to think, what I heard my mouth say was, not in my lifetime.

Wow.

And after I heard myself say that, I went like, where did that come from?

And I was so appalled, Ilana, because as I walked out of that press conference room, I realized that if what I had said came to be true, I was betraying the very purpose of my life, which is to turn over a better planet to future generations, not a worse planet.

And so I went like, well, I am not a traitor.

I am not a traitor.

I am a warrior.

I am going back into the ditches here, back in.

So by the time I got to my office, I said, okay.

I have no idea how long I'm going to be here in this office, but what I'm going to do while I'm here is I'm going to prove that statement wrong that's what i'm going to do wow so it was very fast it all happened within like 30 minutes

so essentially that mission became the fuel that you needed to basically shift everything totally is it scary to say yes to something like this is there imposter syndrome Yeah, it was scary because to begin with, nobody knew what to do.

The Secretary General Ban Ki-moon himself, when he appointed me, and it was a difficult appointment.

But when he appointed me, he basically said, not in these terms, because he's Korean and he's very formal and diplomatic.

But the message was, the political process is in the trash can.

Go and see what you can do with it.

And I thought, okay, that was an interesting thing.

Set up for success.

You know, not much aspiration there from my boss.

But it was scary.

And honestly, I had no idea.

I had no idea what to do.

But what I did know

is

that perhaps there's no guarantee, but perhaps if we could bring many people around the table, collective wisdom would tell us what to do.

So I knew that I personally had no idea.

And if I really thought about it, I could come up maybe with three or four ideas, which by definition would be bad ideas because they're only coming from my feeble little brain.

But if you get

people around the table, experienced people, you know, who have been doing this, and then you open a process.

So that was my first commitment to work with the Secretariat, which are 500 people who have devoted their lives to this process.

definitely much more time and experience than I had, and work with them first to take them out of the trash can because they were all in the trash can can and begin to motivate them and begin to consult with them and have them consult with each other and design a process, a listening and learning process among all these 500 people

so that we would

begin to crawl out of the dark hole that we were all in, hold hands, crawl out, and then begin to put ideas on the table.

And in the beginning, the ideas weren't terribly brilliant, but they improved over time.

Like they always do.

So small experiments, but you are credited as one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, which was a really big deal.

What happened behind the scenes with this agreement?

Because again, clearly you got yourself out of the hole together with everybody else.

And you were driving that mission, vision, etc.

What happened there?

As I say, my first concern was to work with the Secretariat because I knew that they collectively hold the process.

They hold the political process.

They hold the legal process.

They hold the operational process.

They're responsible for putting water on the tables and emptying the trash cans during negotiations.

They're responsible for the legal procedures.

They're responsible for everything.

And without them, nothing happens.

So my first commitment was to my own team and to building them up in all different kinds of ways.

And I must say, I'm so proud of that team.

By the time I left, we had crawled out of the box and they were the highest performing team in the UN without a doubt.

Wow.

Without a doubt.

Otherwise, we would not have been able to reach the Paris Agreement.

So a very beautiful transformation process, collective transformation of a team of people dedicated.

to this very, very difficult mission.

So that was one.

And I sort of think about it, Ilana, in concentric circles.

That was the first circle around me.

Inside that circle was me, myself.

I had to change my attitude to what I can do instead of never in my lifetime attitude and then work with my team.

Then the second concentric circle, of course, is the governments because they're the ones that hold the pen.

They're the ones that sit at the negotiation table.

So I did put a lot of time, energy, thought, and especially listening capacity into

talking to governments who didn't want to talk to each other at all because they were hating each other because of Copenhagen.

So first to listen to their pain and their anger, give that space, and then over several years, begin the process of, yes, we understand that that was terrible.

What would make it different?

What one or two or three components can you think of that would make a different context here?

And just invite that kind of thinking from almost 200 governments in the world and move them then toward a space of creative thinking and innovative collaboration that was not there before.

And then the third concentric circle, I realized that governments would be conservative in what they would agree to or even draft because that is sort of who they are.

Yeah.

Who they are.

That's their terms of reference.

And we certainly couldn't afford a conservative agreement because we wanted an agreement that would accompany the decarbonization of society over decades, not just three or four or five years, but rather over decades.

So it had to be ambitious.

So I decided, well, the ambition is going to have to come from the private sector and from other stakeholders, from NGOs, from youth, from grandparents' circles, from spiritual leaders, from technology providers, from investors, everyone who stands to benefit from a more stable climate.

So I did go out and very intentionally reach several hundred people.

500, I think, also, in what we call the stakeholder realm, to bring them close to the process because they weren't before because it's a governmental process.

Bring them in, give them a sense of confidence, a listening ear.

We really need your help.

We really need you to encourage governments.

We don't need you to hit them over the head.

That's not going to take us very far.

We need you to support and encourage.

And so we built that process over years, right?

That was a five-year process.

This is not a Sunday to Monday process.

Right.

It's not the overnight success that everybody thinks.

But what I love about it, and I was taking notes a little bit, is first of all, I love how you're looking at it as circles.

Like I needed to change myself to understand that it can be done, right?

And my team and then the government and then the private sectors to create that ambition.

But I also love that you're talking about the mindset, the listening, the motivation, the team, and then slowly getting traction because I think one of the things that I'm trying to piece together is you're trying to reach out to these CEOs, head of states, young activists, etc.

They're very busy.

There's probably Trazillion other competing things that are coming their way.

And you need to create that traction for them to say, you know what, out of all the noise, I actually want to back up climate.

This is where I want to put myself, my energy, my money, whatever it is, my name, right?

Talk to me about getting that traction and how do you reach out to these big personas with a lot of ego?

First of all, to reach out to governments wasn't terribly difficult because I knew them all because I had been a negotiator.

So they were all my colleagues.

They're all friends.

So to reach out to them, not as a colleague anymore, but as the executive secretary was pretty easy because I had established friendships and trusting relationships.

Trust is the number one factor here.

And they knew that they could trust me.

I knew that I could trust the conversation.

So that wasn't terribly difficult.

And the fact is that not immediately after Copenhagen, but after one or two years, everybody was thirsty for changing it, for a success.

Everybody's been like, how on earth did we let that happen?

Is it not possible?

And I'm like, yeah, it's possible, but let's figure out how.

So reaching out to governments wasn't terribly difficult, including governments who you might argue were obstreperous, you know, like the Saudi and Arabian government or any of the other oil and gas exporters.

Because I never judged them.

I never blamed them.

I never shamed them.

I really understood that they were exporting that resource because that's what they had to export.

That's where the money was.

Yeah.

That's where the money is.

So from a non-judgmental perspective and a deep listening perspective, perspective, it was relatively easy to contact them and ask for meetings with them.

Plus, I was very willing to travel to where they were.

And I always thought that an in-person meeting or several in-person meetings were always better.

So that wasn't difficult.

With the stakeholders, it was a little bit different for several reasons.

A, because governments feel that the negotiating space is their private property and that nobody should step, nobody should trespass.

And so to bring other stakeholders into that same space was threatening to governments.

Why are they here?

What do they really want?

So I had to be very, very careful about bringing them into this space.

I also had to be careful about not using the budget of the Secretariat for that because the Secretariat does not have a mandate or didn't at that time, it's changed since, but didn't at that time have a mandate to reach out to stakeholders so i had to go out and fundraise with foundations for this very weird idea that i had they're like what

we thought you were working for governments and for the un why do you want to go and talk to ceos well because it's necessary So I did find the funding and I hired a team completely separate from the UN team, completely separate team, and put them in a completely separate office that wasn't really known to most people.

So they were our covert operation.

And they developed, this was all under the direction of Tom Ribbett-Karnak, who's still my business partner, co-author of the book, co-host of the podcast.

We became very, very good friends.

I hired him to lead this stealth operation.

and to help put together a group of individuals who stood ready to help when

there was a problem on the floor in the plenary.

And he did a brilliant job.

And we were able, therefore, to get a lot of

support for the aspirational aspects of that agreement.

I love that because I remember the traction.

And I love what you said.

And I want to translate it a little bit to every listener here, whether you're going to an interview or you're trying to open some kind of doors for investment or for other things, getting that trust that you talked about, Christiana, but also understanding their why, understanding what's behind, right?

Because like you said, some of these ideas or some of these personas, their why is different.

So you need to understand what they're looking at and how do you create a win-win situation?

Because that's everything.

That's how you...

basically invite them to your side of the table versus trying to force you away because that's never going to work.

Well, the other way of thinking about it is not to invite them to your side of the table, but to extend the table over to where they are.

Ah, I love that.

Yeah.

Especially with governments, it was very few times that I made statements.

I was always asking questions because I really wanted to understand what is their interest, what do they need, what are the challenges that they're facing.

And so to ask enough questions so that they themselves come to the conclusion that it is in their self-interest to have a stable planet, but have it come out of their enlightened self-interest rather than trying to convince them of anything.

Governments are sovereign and they will always be.

There's no way that I'm going to tell any government what to do.

Not me, not the UN, not no one.

So it was very much about expanding their mental overtone window from their perspective.

How do you see yourselves in five or 10 years?

What is your plan?

If the planet gets so much hotter, what are you going to do?

So, just extend that so that they could then come to the conclusion: hmm,

maybe we should collaborate on this.

Maybe we should listen here.

This is true for most conversations.

You can get a lot more in many, many cases by really strong questions.

Because if somebody can sell themselves into you or into your product or into co-partnering with you, that's always stronger than you coming and trying to pitch them, right?

So, the questions really strong.

That's definitely been my experience.

I guess my daughters taught me when they were very young not to give advice.

Not a good idea.

So governments and daughters are the same.

Don't give advice.

Ask questions.

Seek to understand.

I'm learning that from my teen right now, let me tell you.

But after the UN, you could have taken basically a backseat.

I did my mark on the world, time to sit on the beach.

And instead, you decided to launch the global optimism.

You wrote The Future We Choose.

You started a podcast that outrays an optimism.

Where is the hunger?

Where do you get that from?

And where are you using this voice?

Well, I guess I stay on the mission because the mission hasn't been accomplished, sadly.

This is a long-term.

This is a marathon.

It is not a spread.

And the Paris Agreement, with all all its flaws and it's full of flaws for sure, it is, however, a long-term play of governments and of all kinds of actors.

But the weakness of that play is it has to be played.

It can't just sit on the shelf.

It's not just going to get better on its own.

No.

You have to engage with it.

It has to be implemented.

It has to be executed in many different ways.

And everybody will implement it differently.

But we do have to get our SH together here.

And otherwise, we're just not going to make it.

I remember the day that the Paris Agreement was finally adopted.

I don't know.

I went to bed at three or four o'clock in the morning and we were all exhausted because nobody had slept in the past three days.

And I slept.

until about 10 and then I woke up at 10 and reached for the phone and called poor Tom Karnak and I said, said, Tom, I know exactly what we have to do now.

And he says, so do I.

Go back to sleep.

Oh my God.

So I did go back to sleep for a few hours.

But there's just still so much to be done.

Now, so much has been accomplished.

That's the other really, really fascinating part, right?

There's a lot of literature on something called the Paris Effect.

through which you can prove that since the adoption of the Paris Agreement, of course, we've had crazy political elections in the United States, for example.

But despite that, the amazing thing is that all of the technologies that address climate change have come down in price by 80, 90%.

They have increased in efficiency by 40 to 50 percent.

They are totally competitive against the fossil fuels, against oil, against gas, certainly against coal.

There is more investment being made into clean technologies today than into dirty technologies by 200%.

We're investing two times as much globally, right, into clean technologies than we are into dirty technologies of power.

There is much more demand for those technologies than there used to be.

The demand for fossil fuels is going down the drain.

Even the fossil fuel companies are not investing in renewing their oil fields.

It really is quite impressive what has happened in the past 10 years because we're at the 10th anniversary now.

So it's quite impressive what has happened and it is not enough.

So because so much has happened, because so much is possible, but also because it's not enough yet.

That's why I keep at this.

That's amazing.

One of the things, Christiana, before that is a lot of people are listening to this episode and saying, but I don't know if I can change something big.

Maybe I missed the mark.

Maybe I'm too late.

Maybe some of these things are so big, bigger than one of us, like you said, right?

It needs a collective.

It's a movement, but somebody can actually start the movement.

What would you say to some of these people?

They want more from their life.

They want to create bigger things, but they're maybe afraid to start or they don't know where to start.

Start with yourself.

That is a really important, important step because honestly, it's just so disingenuous to go out there and want to have a kind of a change that is inconsistent with who you are as a person.

It just doesn't cut it and people can tell the difference.

They can tell, you know, if somebody's just out there as an actor, as an actress is performing or whether there's something genuine there.

So my first point

is make sure that the change that you want is one that really comes from the very, very root of you and that you're living consistently with that

because otherwise it's just two-faced and you lose all integrity.

So start with yourself and then find kindred souls because there are some things that we can do on our own, but mostly we can't.

I mean, Ilana, even losing weight, which you think, okay, that is completely under your control.

No, you need people to help you, to keep you accountable.

I just use it as a stupid example, but the point is

we are social beings.

We are not little islands onto ourselves.

And we tend to think that, you know, me, you know, strong, smart, outgoing, whatever, I can do.

No, whenever you think I can do, ask yourself, are you sure?

Are you sure that you can do it alone?

Or would it actually be more effective, more efficient, longer term, and above all, more fun if you do it with others?

And again, we see it also in Leap Academy.

We see it for myself.

I need my own community of CEOs building some big things so that I can talk to them and create my own community.

The people that are in Leap Academy, they need the people around them.

So I can totally relate because I can always go faster and higher when I have a full network by my side to help me out.

I'm so alone otherwise.

Absolutely.

So, Christiana, where do they find more information?

Obviously, they can listen to the podcast, they can read the book, they can look you up, what else?

Well, what is exciting is that soon, and I don't know how soon soon is, but certainly over the next month or two, I will be launching a digital archive.

And the digital archive will bring together all of my thinking, all of my work, in hopefully a very digestible way and in a powered way.

So you can go in there and you can play with AI inside the archive and find a whole bunch of information that maybe even I did not put in there.

It's just one of my projects right now to put it all together.

So it actually looks not multicolored.

It looks like you're walking into an archive.

But it's going to be very, very easy to use and I hope fun.

And it is just spread with all kinds of magical little tricks in there and music and different colors that you can put in yourself that you can choose.

And so it's a fun project soon to come out.

Amazing.

Oh my God, you're so unstoppable.

Thank you so much.

Really fun conversation, Ilana.

Thank you.

And congratulations for Leap Academy.

You are supporting so many people.

Really wonderful.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

If you did, please share it with friends.

Now, also, if you're feeling stuck or simply want more from your own career, watch this 30-minute free training at leapacademy.com/slash training.

That's leapacademy.com slash training.

See you in the next episode of the Leap Academy with Zilana Golancho.