If you're angry, if you're despairing of whatever - what that is is energy. The only thing you have to do is harvest that energy and change the chara… - Christiana Figueres

Educating young women and empowering women to come to decision-making tables is the strongest thing that we can do for the climate. When there are more women in boardrooms and in high-level positions in institutions, you get decisions that are wiser and longer term. Of course there are many men that also do this. But there is a tendency for women to be more collaborative, which is the basis of what we need to do, and they tend to think much more long term. [Women] have the first duty of care of our newborn children and hence, biologically, we’re geared towards that stewardship. But it is just plain stupid, frankly, not to use 50% of human potential. We are in such an emergency that we need to deploy 100% of our potential.

On my first press conference, a journalist asked...Ms. Figueres, do you think that a global agreement is ever going to be possible? And without engaging brain, I heard me utter, not in my lifetime. Well, you can imagine the faces of my press team, who were horrified at this crazy Costa Rican woman who was their new boss. And I was horrified, too. Now, I wasn't horrified at me because I'm kind of used to myself...I was actually horrified at the consequences of what I had just said. Horrified because I thought, OK, well, that expresses the mood. But is that what we really want for our future generations? Are we going to give up now just because this was an incredible attempt and we failed? Is that a reason to give up, and then to condemn future generations to the ravages that will be brought upon them? And I, you know, very quickly I said no, you know, I can't do that.

it's never one individual. Far from it. It has to be a critical mass of people who bring their ingenuity, their innovation, their creative thinking and their solution development together. If we're going to do this, it has to be an everyone-in effort. So we went from something that was impossible in 2009 to something that was, OK, maybe possible. Over the years, we moved from possible to likely. And then, eventually, in 2015, to unstoppable. So that arc of possibility is what eventually led to the Paris Agreement.