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| Christina Figueres. |
The offices of
the UN’s climate change body in Bonn have glorious views over a pretty
stretch of the Rhine river, looking out on grasslands and splendid old and new
buildings. Just a short distance away is the historic campus most famous for
being where the Marshall plan was signed after the Second World War.
That plan, which channelled billions in American aid to
rebuild European economies, was instrumental in creating modern Europe, and
redrawing the global economy. Instead of the punitive measures and reparations
inflicted on Germany in the Versailles treaty, the Marshall plan offered
healing and financial support – a message of hope, not fear.
Christiana Figueres, the UN’s climate change chief, has a
task just as great as the architects of that plan. She is in charge of the
world’s response to global warming, a threat potentially more catastrophic than
any disaster yet seen, but one which is so slow-burning that governments and
the public have been able largely to ignore it for more than three decades
since scientists began to prove incontrovertibly the dangers that greenhouse
gas emissions pose to our planet’s stability.
Read about this remarkable woman on The Guardian - “Christiana Figueres: the woman tasked with saving the world from global warming.”
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