Christiana Figueres, a 53-year-old Costa Rican currently serving as an adviser to the Spanish energy company ENDESA, told reporters here that she was putting her hat into the ring to become the next executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

The UNFCC announced last month that de Boer would step down from July 1 to join the consultancy group KPMG as global advisor on climate and sustainability and work with a number of universities.

UN chief Ban Ki-moon is to make his selection after receiving recommendations from a panel of UN experts.

The announcement of de Boer's upcoming departure came nearly two months after the Copenhagen summit on climate change, seen even by its backers as a disappointment and by its critics as a chaotic failure.

De Boer had pinned hopes on a breakthrough in Copenhagen that would unlock a new treaty on climate change that would take effect after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol's current pledges expire.

Instead, after nearly two weeks of talks, the summit was only able to yield a general agreement on limiting warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Climate change negotiators are due to hold crunch multilateral talks in Cancun, Mexico from November 29 to December 10.

Figueres, the daughter of former Costa Rican president Jose Figueres, told the press conference that the Copenhagen summit was "a big step for the community of nations, but a small step for the planet."

"In Cancun, we need to be very creative and very innovative," she added.

But she defended the United Nations as the appropriate framework "to give a voice to all countries."

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