Figueres was born in Costa Rica in 1956. Her father was the president of Costa Rica three separate times, and her mother was that country’s ambassador to Israel. She has an undergraduate degree from Swarthmore College and a master’s degree from the London School of Economics. After working some years for the Costa Rican government, she and her family moved the United States, where she began working on the issues of renewable energy and climate change. In 1995, she founded the Center for Sustainable Development of the Americas (CSDA), which she ran for eight years. From the mid-1990s to 2010, she was a negotiator of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, representing Costa Rica.

In 2010, six months after the Copenhagen Accord—widely seen as a failure—UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon asked Figueres to become the next executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Over the next five years, she worked to build consensus and bridge differences between countries. This culminated in the successful Paris Agreement of 2015, which all 195 participant countries accepted. She remained executive secretary until 2016.

In 2016, Figueres cofounded Global Optimism with Tom Rivett-Carnac.