Welcome to UNEP
Hello Delegates, Welcome to BMUN 56!
My name is Samantha Liang and I am this year’s head chair for the United Nations Environment Programme. During committee, we will be discussing the following topics: Global Action on Electronic Waste and Freshwater Scarcity Management. I thought that these topics would be especially interesting because they both present challenging problems that require innovative and multifaceted approaches. Please read the topic synopses for further introduction and elaboration on e-waste and water scarcity. I am excited to see what everyone comes up with and I’m sure our committee is going to be packed full of interesting discussions and ideas.
In future posts, I will talk about what I expect in position papers and answer any questions that may arise. I will also post any links that I find interesting and that I think might be relevant and helpful to your research. But first off, I’ll quickly introduce myself. I am a third-year Bioengineering major at Berkeley and though I’m originally from Fullerton in sunny Southern California, I’ve adjusted and come to love the cool air and rainstorms of the Bay Area. When I’m not hitting the books, I spend most of my time researching in a Synthetic Biology lab. I really enjoy working in the lab and love the feeling of having a project to work on. In my free time, I’m always up for watching movies with friends and eating frozen yogurt. This is my third year chairing for BMUN and I am truly excited to meet all of you. My co-chairs are Lynette Robinson and Ryo Wakabayashi and they will be introducing themselves later posts.
All of us are looking forward to seeing you in March and hope that you will find the topics engaging. Good luck with your research and if you have any questions, please feel free to comment on this blog or email me at samanthaliang (at) berkeley.edu and I will do my best to answer them.
Best Wishes,
Samantha
March 2nd, 2008 at 9:21 pm
Germany is definately look forward to attending the conference coming up next week. We’ve come up with various of great ideas and can’t wait to share them and hear other nations ideas about solving the problem with fresh water scarcity and global actions on electronic wastes. These topics are very crucial and we find them very interesting, which makes us want to assist the situation. We understand how scarcity of fresh water has taken a toll on people lives in impoverished nations and how inappropriate disposal of e-waste is very hazardous. Peoples life and health is at stake. However there are so many ways to save these lives. We question whether it’s ok to state in a solution to encourage people to donate money for water in an organization that has already been established called Charity: Water? Nevertheless, we are looking forward to the conference.
March 3rd, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Hello Germany!
I think it would be acceptable to advertise an already established charity. However, what might be more appropriate would be to state in your solution to possibly create a partnership with the charity and help them advertise and get the word out. Or perhaps even starting a similar UN-sponsored program that follows Charity: Water’s model. I may be wrong about this but I think that Charity: Water only has headquarters in 3 cities - so maybe Germany might be interested in proposing an organization that has roots in more countries? Use your best judgment, I look forward to hearing what you come up with at the conference.