Christiana Figueres Joins Leadership Council of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves
Washington, DC (April 25, 2017) – The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves announced today that Christiana Figueres has been named to its Leadership Council. Figueres, former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), will join an existing group of global leaders and business executives who are working with the Alliance to help billions of people in the developing world access safe, efficient stoves and cleaner fuels.
“We need to bend the curve of emissions by 2020, and clean cookstoves and fuels can be an important contribution to that turning point,” Figueres said. “Clean cooking is an issue that’s close to my heart and I’m glad to be joining the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves in its work to ensure it is a global development priority.”
Nearly three billion people around the world depend on wood, charcoal, animal dung, or coal in open fires or in inefficient stoves for their daily cooking needs. The emissions contain key contributors to global climate change, carbon dioxide and methane, as well as other short-lived climate pollutants, including black carbon. The result is widespread environmental and health problems, including millions of premature deaths annually.
“Ms. Figueres is one of the great leaders of our time, and when it comes to fighting climate change, there’s been no better champion,” said Alliance CEO Radha Muthiah. “She deserves much of the credit for passage of the historic Paris Agreement on climate and I’m honored she’ll be joining us on the Alliance’s Leadership Council in our work to improve health, empower women, and protect the climate and environment.”
[pullquote] Figueres, the UN’s former top climate change official, assumed the helm of international climate change negotiations after the much-anticipated Copenhagen conference of 2009 failed to reach a global consensus. She arrived determined to lead the process to a new, universal climate change agreement. Building toward that goal, she directed successive, successful annual sessions of the UNFCCC Conference of the Parties culminating in the historic Paris Climate Change Agreement adopted in December 2015.
Throughout her tenure, Figueres brought together national and sub national governments, corporations, financial institutions and communities of faith, think tanks and technology providers, NGOs and parliamentarians, to jointly deliver the unprecedented agreement. For this achievement, she has been credited with forging a new brand of collaborative diplomacy.
The Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves is a public-private partnership hosted by the United Nations Foundation that seeks to save lives, improve livelihoods, empower women, and protect the environment by creating a thriving global market for clean and efficient household cooking solutions. The Alliance works with public, private and non-profit partners to accelerate production, deployment, and use of clean and efficient cookstoves and fuels in developing countries. The Alliance’s 100 by ’20 goal calls for 100 million households to adopt cleaner and more efficient cookstoves and fuels by 2020.