From Cali to Yerevan, IEG takes its seat as an official observer
Accreditation confirmed. Seven socio-cultural regions, one delegation, and a founding mission carried across two COPs.
At COP16 in Cali, a room of Indigenous, local community and Afro-Descendant representatives made a collective decision: the Communities Advisory Panel had done its work, and something with more standing needed to take its place. Two years on, that decision has a credential to go with it.
The Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity has accredited the International Environmental Guardianship (IEG) as an observer organisation for the seventeenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP17) and NP-MOP-6, in Yerevan, Armenia, from 19 to 30 October 2026.
Observer status is a modest first milestone for IEG. It is the difference between hearing about a text and being in the room while it is drafted. IEG brings to that room a membership drawn from seven socio-cultural regions, and a mission that is deliberately narrow: trust, ethics, equity and nature-rights-based frameworks in the nature markets.
The delegation
The IEG delegation to COP17 is led by Hanieh Moghani, Regional Chair for Asia, as Head of Delegation. She is joined by:
- AJ Bird, Regional Chair for North America
- Aleksei Tsykarev, Regional Chair for Europe and the Russian Federation
- Miguel Chindoy, Regional Chair for Latin America and the Caribbean
- Renee Raroa, Regional Chair for Pacific
- Vital Bambanze, Regional Chair for Africa
The delegation arrives in Yerevan with a single message that runs through every session on its schedule: that Indigenous Peoples, Local Communities and Afro-Descendant peoples are direct parties to decisions about nature finance and biodiversity market architecture, not stakeholders consulted after the architecture is built.
IEG acknowledges the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the members of the former Communities Advisory Panel whose decision at COP16 in Cali made this next delegation possible.
Image: Yerevan skyline at dawn by Serouj Ourishian (Սէրուժ Ուրիշեան), via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.