The Firm
Sirena Consulting was founded on a simple conviction: that the quality of environmental governance has direct impacts on human and environmental health — and that getting it right requires more than technical knowledge. It requires experience, political judgment, and genuine commitment to the work. The most pressing environmental challenges don't respond to any single perspective, sector, or institution. Lasting solutions require bringing together varied expertise, experiences, and voices — and the strongest outcomes emerge from collective effort that translates what the science shows into policy, governance, and action.
As a principal-led boutique practice, every Sirena engagement is led by Erica L. Nuñez — not delegated. That means clients receive senior-level thinking, direct relationship, and advice shaped by firsthand experience inside the institutions and processes that determine environmental outcomes. This is not consulting at a distance. It is partnership in the fullest sense.
Sirena Consulting was established in 2023 — a new firm built on more than two decades of senior-level practice across the institutions that shape global environmental policy.
The Founder
Erica L. Nuñez has spent more than two decades working inside the environmental governance systems that most organizations navigate from the outside — across U.S. federal government, international NGOs, state government, and independent consulting. Her career spans commercial fisheries compliance, multilateral environmental negotiations, international program leadership, state-level strategic planning, and independent advisory practice. That range — from enforcement to treaty table to cabinet advisory — is what Sirena brings to every engagement.
As International Affairs Specialist in the U.S federal government, she developed policy positions across multilateral environmental negotiations — spanning the Minamata Convention on Mercury, Montreal Protocol, Basel Convention, and the UN Environment Assembly. She served as U.S. Focal Point for the Cartagena Convention — the international environmental treaty governing the protection of the Caribbean Sea and its coastal resources — and as the regional lead for Latin America and the Caribbean.
In her NGO leadership roles, she co-developed a $14.5M public-private partnership spanning seven countries, chaired a Technical Advisory Committee of policy, industry and academic experts for a five-country comparative analysis of plastic pollution policy interventions, and led institutional engagement across the UN Plastics Treaty negotiations, the Basel Convention, and the Science-Policy Panel on Chemicals, Waste and Pollution Prevention.
She subsequently served as Special Assistant to the Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality — a cabinet-level advisory role spanning air quality, water quality, coastal management, waste management, and land resources — where she co-led the agency's 2025–2029 Strategic Plan process across a 1,700-person agency. Her policy work is complemented by commissioned research and publication — including a policy scoping report authored for a UN regional office and contributing authorship in international plastics governance research published by a leading UK research institution.
The Name: Sirena
Sirena — pronounced see-REH-nah — is the Spanish word for mermaid, drawn from the Caribbean cultures that shaped who I am.
I chose the name as a deliberate homage to my heritage — and because it described me before it described a firm. I grew up in the Northeastern United States with Caribbean roots, a childhood shaped by two very different relationships with the sea. The North Atlantic is formidable and unsparing — an ocean that demands respect. The Caribbean Sea is warm and alive with color, an ocean that feels like home. That contrast — between rigor and warmth, between force and belonging — has lived in this work from the beginning.
Water, in every culture, is understood as the source of life. We cannot exist without it. That recognition is not background to this practice — it is the reason for it.
Sirena is woman-led. The mermaid as symbol felt right — a feminine figure rooted in myth and the sea, navigating between worlds. That is, in many ways, what this practice does.