Xiye Bastida is a 21 year old Mexican climate justice activist from the Otomi-Toltec Indigenous community in the highlands of Central Mexico. In April of 2020, she co-founded Re-Earth Initiative to advocate for frontline communities and solution-oriented efforts. Since 2019, she has been a prominent leader in the youth climate movement, organizing climate strikes and protests. Notably, she co-organized a 300,000 person climate strike in New York and spoke at the Biden Climate Summit in 2021, followed by closing the World Leaders Summit at COP26. 

As an Ambassador to the UN High Level Champions since 2021, Xiye strives to bridge the gap of policy, youth inclusion, and funding to help empower the movement. She is also a commissioner in the Climate Governance Commission, and serves as a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Champion. Xiye is a Global Choices’ Arctic Angel working to protect the Arctic. She authored the first chapter of the All We Can Save Anthology, and is Executive Producer in an upcoming documentary. She is the recipient of the 2018 UN Spirit Award, and was named ELLE Woman of the Year in 2023.

Pam Pearson is a former U.S. diplomat with 20 years of experience working on global issues, including climate change, non-proliferation, and various initiatives on the environmental and social policies of the multilateral development banks. She served in postings to Ecuador, Sweden, Norway, and several of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, designing some of the very first environmental health programs there. 

Pam founded the International Cryosphere Climate Initiative (ICCI) immediately after COP-15 to bring greater attention and policy focus to the rapid and markedly similar changes occurring to cryosphere regions throughout the globe; their importance to the global climate system; and the need for intensified and specific mitigation efforts to slow these changes and allow greater adaptation by local peoples.

Lewis William Gordon Pugh, OIG, is a British-South African endurance swimmer and ocean advocate. Dubbed the “Sir Edmund Hillary of swimming”, he is the first person to complete a long-distance swim in every ocean of the world, and he frequently swims in vulnerable ecosystems to draw attention to their plight.

Sally Ranney, President of Global Choices, is an environmental visionary with 45 years of experience in natural resource, climate and renewable energy policy. Sally is President and Co-founder of Global Choices, President Emeritus and Co-founder of the American Renewable Energy Institute/AREDAY Summit and an Advisor to the Getches-Wilkinson Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado. She served as a resource policy analyst for The Wilderness Society and has worked with three US Presidents, with a Presidential Appointment by R. Reagan. Ranney has worked in many countries around the world protecting biodiversity and wild areas. She serves on the Board of the National Wildlife Federation and founded Corridors of Life, a satellite GIS project identifying and advocating for a network of wildlife corridors throughout the Rocky Mountains of the US and Canada. Sally has been recognized with numerous awards, including the prestigious Horace Albright Award and the International Conservation Award.

Inge Relph – known for policy innovation is Exec. Director and co–Founder of Global Choices, a USA and UK non for profit working in exciting new  ways to protect the Global Commons, especially Earth’s Arctic Ice Shield and climate stabilizer. Female led, Global Choices mentors a global leadership network of 60 Arctic Angels.

Vasser Seydel has taken on Deep Seabed Mining, amongst other underrepresented environmental issues, as the Campaign Director at The Oxygen Project. She serves on the board of directors for Dr. Sylvia Earle’s Mission Blue, the National Center of Family Philanthropy, and the Turner Foundation, and has the honor of representing the International Union for the Conservation of Nature as an IUCN Environmental Youth Ambassador, Julian Lennon’s White Feather Foundation as a Global Ambassador, and Global Choices as an Arctic Angel.

Frederick Mitchell serves as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Public Service of The Bahamas.

He has previously served as Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Culture (1992 – 1997); Former Chairman of Council for Foreign and Community Relations of CARICOM; Founding Member of The Bahamas Committee on Southern Africa. He has also recently Chaired the Commonwealth Experts for Presidential Elections Committee.

As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Mitchell was instrumental in the fight to integrate Haiti as a member state of CARICOM. He also negotiated a number of important international agreements on behalf of The Bahamas, including the Shengen Visa Agreement and the European Partnership Agreement.

He was also instrumental in establishing the Bahamian diplomatic mission in Cuba. During his tenure he also established the Bahamas Embassy in China.

Leonardo Crippa is a descendant of the Kolla people located in the Northwest of Argentina and a Senior Attorney at the Indian Law Resource Center. For almost 20 years, he has practiced law in the field of human rights and advocated for the enhancement of multilateral development banks’ policies and procedures, especially those aiming at safeguarding indigenous peoples from environmental and social harm due to bank-funded projects. He was engaged in the development of the American Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples adopted by the General Assembly of the Organization of American States in 2016. Mr. Crippa has also represented several indigenous communities in cases before both the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights based in Washington, D.C. and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights based in San Jose, Costa Rica.

Daniela Lerda leads Nia Tero’s work in Amazonia. Prior to Nia Tero, she was the Coordinator of the Ford Foundation’s Alliance for Climate and Land Use (CLUA) in Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. Before joining CLUA, she led PADMA Environmental Consulting, a company she founded to work on the intersection of business and biodiversity conservation. Daniela also spent three years at Funbio where, among other responsibilities, she facilitated a network of 22 conservation trust funds on behalf of RedLAC, the Latin American Network of Environmental Trust Funds. Prior to that, she was Grant Director for the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund, acting as a Program Officer for South America, responsible for overseeing grants to over 300 civil society organizations. She also served as Director of Conservation Outreach and Community Training at Conservation International and previously as Director of Global Communications and, early in her career, at the Inter-American Development Bank.

Nemonte Nenquimo is a Waorani woman, mother, and leader, who has dedicated her life to the defense of Indigenous ancestral territory and cultural survival in the Amazon rainforest. She is the co-founder of the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance and Amazon Frontlines. As the first female president of the Waorani organization of Pastaza province, Nemonte led her people to a historic legal victory against the Ecuadorian government, which protected over 200,000 hectares of primary rainforest in the Amazon from oil drilling and set a precedent for Indigenous rights across the region. She is the winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize for Central and South America, the United Nations’ Champions of the Earth Award, BBC 100 Women of 2020 and TIME 100 most influential people in the world.

Paul Roughan is a researcher, expert, and advisor in islands knowledge, global system changes, and Indigenous ontologies. He leads several initiatives centered on Melanesia, which is the richly diverse region spanning the island of New Guinea through Fiji and the deep Pacific beyond. As the founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute, Paul has a deep interest in finding ways to diversify global notions about indigeneity, grounded in the layered, collective sovereignty practiced in the Pacific Islands region. At Nia Tero, he leads the Sky Islands Initiative, which was born out of the Prime Minister of Solomon Islands’s 2018 pledge to set aside more than 20 percent of the land area of Solomon Islands for protection. It spans the biocultural landscapes across the Southwest Pacific and Melanesian region. Paul is a Solomon Islander who speaks on Indigenous guardianship, oceans, Indigenous rights, policy, scaling equitable climate finance solutions, and NFTs/cryptocurrency as a mechanism for sovereign Indigenous funding.