Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen is a Costa Rican diplomat with 35 years of experience in high level national and international policy and multilateral negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. During the next six years she dedicated herself to rebuilding the global climate change negotiating process based on fairness, transparency and collaboration, leading to the 2015 Paris Agreement, widely recognized as a historical achievement. Over the years she has worked in the fields of climate change, sustainable development, energy, land use, technical and financial cooperation.

She has collaborated in the design of the main instruments to face climate change and is a key promoter of Latin America’s active participation in the Convention (UNFCCC). In 2016 she was named by TIME magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world.