As of December 2010, Iryna Makarenko is at the Permanent Secretariat to the Commission on the Protection of Black Sea Against Pollution (Bucharest Convention), an international intergovernmental organization based in Istanbul, Turkey.
In April 2014 Iryna has been assigned as Pollution Monitoring and Assessment Officer. Before moving to Turkey worked as a diplomat in the Mission of Ukraine to the European Union in Brussels being responsible for EU-Ukraine cooperation in the field of environment, transport, space, research and education; earlier as a Deputy Head of Office to Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine and as a diplomat of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine.
Iryna has a Master Degree in the field of Environmental and Energy Law obtained at a Faculty of Law of the Catholic University of Leuven (Kingdom of Belgium), Certificates on Water Law (University of Dundee, Scotland), Environmental Diplomacy (University of Geneva, Switzerland) and Regional Economics (University of Genoa, Italy).