Ex-UN climate chief doesn't see Paris-type moment in Glasgow

The woman who engineered the Paris agreement six years ago doesn’t expect the United Nations climate conference that just started in Glasgow to end with the same kind of big landmark

GLASGOW, Scotland -- Christiana Figueres knows how to hammer out a climate deal, and she doesn’t expect the United Nations conference that just started in Glasgow to end with the kind of big moment she engineered in Paris six years ago. But she remains optimistic, saying failure “is not going to happen here.”

Figueres, the former executive secretary of the U.N.'s climate change program, was a key architect behind the historic 2015 Paris climate agreement. She says the negotiations leading to the two-week conference in Scotland have not progressed enough to reach the U.N.’s goals of cutting global greenhouse emissions in half from current levels and securing $100 billion a year in climate aid from rich nations to poor ones.

Those goals probably won’t be hit for another two years, but that’s OK, Figueres told The Associated Press.

“From a science perspective, we’re still in time, even if we do it in two years,” Figueres said in a late Sunday sit-down interview at the negotiations site. “From a political perspective, it is a disappointment for many, and I understand. So I do not celebrate it, but I think that we have a responsibility to be honest and to really understand the complexity of what we’re doing here.”