The world's top climate negotiator is feeling optimistic. She says you should too: CNN

(CNN)At first glance, Christiana Figueres doesn't have that many reasons to be optimistic.The Costa Rican diplomat played a pivotal role in negotiating the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. But while the deal was widely praised as a landmark achievement, it has since begun to crumble. 

 

The United States left the pact under President Donald Trump, and negotiations over key aspects of the deal's implementation have repeatedly failed.

 

Yet Figueres says she still feels upbeat about fighting climate change.

 

"It's a deliberate choice," she told CNN in a video call. "This is not about subjecting ourselves to huge sacrifices that lead us to feeling that we're having a worse life, it's actually exactly the opposite," she said.

 

"This is about moving toward a much better life, a life that has better health conditions, that has better urban conditions, that has better transport conditions, that has safer investment conditions."

A slight woman with short hair, Figueres has the sort of no-nonsense attitude that's called for when the future of the world is at stake and it's up to you to find a solution. 

 

She took over as the UN's top climate official in 2010, following the failed Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. 

 

When the Paris Agreement was signed five years later, Figueres was widely credited with making it happen. She also made the radical decision to bring the private sector and NGOs into the negotiations.

 

The idea that fighting climate change will make people's lives better is a key theme in Figueres' upcoming book "The Future We Choose."

 

Figueres and the book's co-author Tom Rivett-Carnac, who were both speaking from the Swiss ski resort of Davos for the World Economic Forum in January, told CNN their "stubborn optimism" is inspired by changes they have witnessed first hand. 

 

"We are in a different world than we were two years ago, the level of civil disobedience that has emerged all around the world, we haven't seen for a generation, it's incredibly positive," Rivett-Carnac said. 

 

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The problem, she said, is that there isn't much time to take this control: A decade, at best. 

 

"Ten years from now, in 2030, we will either have written a very positive story, or we will really be condemned to an endless destruction. So for these 10 years we're holding the pen," Figueres said.

 

Read the original CNN article