UN picks Costa Rican Figueres as new climate chief

The United Nations appointed Christiana Figueres of Costa Rica on Monday to be its climate chief to head stalled international talks on how to contain the world's greenhouse gas emissions. 

Figueres, 53, will take over from Dutchman Yvo de Boer as head of the UN climate change secretariat from July 1.                  

She beat fellow short-listed candidate Marthinus van Schalkwyk, a former South African environment minister, for a position meant to rally global accord on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol after December's disappointing summit in Copenhagen.           

Van Schalkwyk is his country's tourism minister.                            

"Ms Figueres is an international leader on strategies to address global climate change and brings to this position a passion for the issue, deep knowledge of the stakeholders and valuable hands-on experience with the public sector, non-profit sector and private sector," UN spokesman Martin Nesirky said.                

The scale of Figueres' task is underscored by a Copenhagen summit where 120 world leaders failed to reach a binding deal, pledging instead to mobilize $30 billion from 2010-2012 to help poor countries deal with droughts and floods, and to try to limit warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius.                                             

This year, negotiators have agreed little except to hold two extra sessions in the run-up to a meeting in Mexico that begins in late November.                                             

Many policymakers expect the Mexico meeting to fall short of a binding deal, looking to 2011 for agreement on a successor to Kyoto, which expires in 2012.                                            

Some analysts are doubtful of any new formal, binding pact beyond Kyoto, expecting instead a patchwork of national targets and schemes.