UNEP

Freshwater Scarcity Management 

Resolutions that Passed:
Resolution A-1
Resolution A-2
Resolution A-6
Resolution A-7

Others:
Resolution A-3
Resolution A-4
Resolution A-5
Resolution A-8

Global Action on Electronic Waste 

Resolutions that passed:
Resolution B-1
Resolution B-2
Resolution B-3
Resolution B-5
Resolution B-6

Others:
Resolution B-4

This blog wouldn’t let me upload word documents so I had to convert them all into pdfs.  Hopefully you guys all have Adobe Reader!  It’s free to download if you don’t have it on your computer.

Thank you all for a great weekend! It really was super tough to choose the awards and if I could have I would have given out many many more.  You guys were great and the level of the debate was excellent, and thank you for bearing with me throughout the entire weekend.  My vice chairs and I had a wonderful time chairing for you all and I hope to see some of you again next year.  And good luck to all the graduating seniors! If you end up coming to Cal, make sure you check out BMUN as a potential extracurricular activity!

Best wishes,

Samantha

Wow I can’t believe it’s almost here!

Bring your umbrellas everyone - it might rain this weekend!  I sure hope not though.

Can’t wait!

-Samantha

An article I found:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/03/11/pharma.waterfish.ap/index.html

“Drugs in water causing troubling to fish, wildlife”

Just another example of water contamination that I didn’t think to include in the topic synopsis.  I thought you guys might find it interesting.  If only there were a way to not only prevent future water pollution, but also somehow remove all of the existing contaminants from the water.  Let’s hope that there are researchers working on that now!

I’m glad to have talked to several of you during my online office hours and that you guys found it helpful.  I unfortunately will not be holding any more, but my vice chairs may periodically sign on to field questions, so add bmununep56 to your buddy list and feel free to IM them if you see them online.  They are super friendly and knowledgeable - the best vice chairs you and I could ask for.

I’m very excited about this weekend and I can’t wait to see you all!

Best,

Samantha

I will be holding online office hours at least three times before the conference.

• Thursday 3/6 from 4-5pm and 8-9pm
• Tuesday 3/11 from 5-6pm

If you want to talk to me during my online office hours, sign onto AIM, and IM me on my UNEP screenname: bmununep56

Online office hours will be an easy way to get quick questions answered or just to chat with your chairs. If a lot of people show up on Thursday, then I will try to add more times onto the list.

Also, I wanted to throw out a plug for freerice.com

freerice.com has been online for awhile now but some of you still may not know about it. Basically, when you go onto the page, it asks you a vocabulary question, and for each question you get right, the sponsors of the program donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Programme. As you get the questions right, the difficulty increases, and if you miss a question, the words get a little easier. You can play as much as you want, and it’s a great way to improve your vocabulary (and study for the SATs!) Educational and philantropic!

I definitely encourage everyone to click on that link and go check it out, but the reason I bring it up is that freerice.com is a very innovative project that utilizes modern technology and a fundraising technique that can definitely be applied to some UNEP projects. I hope you all will come up with ideas that are just as interesting.

Only two more weeks until the conference!

I’ve gotten a lot of your position papers and have been making my way through them. The ones that I’ve read have been great so far.

I imagine that I should be getting a lot more of your papers in the mail this week. However I did want to mention something. I’ve been getting a lot of papers by email and I’m sorry but I’m just not able to print out 40 ten-page papers. If I got your emailed papers before the deadline, then I will consider you eligible for committee awards. However, if you want your papers to be read and scored, please print out a hard copy of them and mail them to BMUN as soon as you can. If I get them before the conference, then I or my vice chairs will read it.

The entire secretariat has been very busy prepping for the conference and I think it’s going to be an amazing weekend. I’m also the Special Events officer and have been actively involved in planning the opening/closing ceremonies as well as the delegate dance, and there’s definitely been so much to do in order to make sure everything runs smoothly and looks great. I’m especially excited because this year, for our keynote speaker speech during opening ceremonies, Greg Mortenson, best-selling author of Three Cuts of Tea, has recorded a video especially for BMUN. Also, he has generously donated a free copy of his book to every delegate! He’s an inspiring and interesting person, and a great speaker, so I definitely encourage all of you to try to make it to our opening ceremonies.

The dance is called BMUN Jetsetters and is an around-the-world theme and will be beautifully decorated. There is going to be an amazing DJ and a casino where you can gamble BMUN dollars, and then cash them in at the prize station for raffle tickets for over $200 worth of prizes. It’s going to be a great time for everyone who comes.

And of course I’m looking forward to working with my vice chairs and chairing for all of you! I hope as the conference gets closer, I’ll see some comments from you guys on this blog.

If there are any comments or concerns, just comment here or email me and I will do my best to address them.

Here’s a short blurb from my co-chair Lynette Robinson, who is a 2nd year in BMUN:

Last year I co-chaired WTO and served on the logistics staff. I like sleeping, trying new foods, and shaking my bootay. I dislike being stuck inside all day. I look forward to seeing all the smiling, innocent faces of the delegates this March and my advice for you is to do really well on you papers and mention at least 2 facts of some sort (it will really earn you those extra points that make a difference). See you in March.

And here’s Ryo’s Introduction:

Hello delegates,

My name is Ryo Wakabayashi and I am one of two co-chairs for UNEP this year. I’m a freshman majoring in chemistry. I’m originally from Tokyo, Japan, but attended middle school and high school in the Bay Area. Besides studying and preparing for BMUN 56, I really enjoy watching and reading about sports. My advice to you would be to simply come prepared and feel confident about yourself. I’m really looking forward to see you all in March. Let’s make UNEP the best committee in BMUN56!

I’ve been getting some emails about position papers, so I’ve attached the Position Paper Guidelines for BMUN56 to this post. I think that this information is also in the delegate guide. Please review it for information about how the paper should be structured and also for the grading rubric.

Position Paper Guidelines

I would like to see everyone follow the format as closely as possible, and I also have a few more important tips for your UNEP paper. I don’t expect 18 page papers and would actually be a overwhelmed if anyone sent me papers the size as novels. Please try your best to be concise and only include relevant information - but of course be complete in your research. Also don’t forget to cite your sources in your paper with either footnotes or citations - without citations, your score could suffer even if the paper is well written. On the topic of sources, please do not cite Wikipedia as a source of information, although you might find useful links to other pages there. Feel free to also use the sources on the topic synopses! Be creative and smart about possible solutions and analysis of the situations - I look forward to reading all of your papers.

Lastly, BMUN has a VERY strict plagarism policy regarding position papers. Our official policy is that any paper that is caught using material without citations will be disqualified from a research paper, and that any school with more than four cases of plagarism will be disqualified from a delegation award. For our committee, any delegate that has been caught plagarizing will be disqualified from ANY award, both research and in-committee - so please do not plagiarize, it is definitely not worth it and always a disappointment to your chairs and your fellow delegates.
Just as a reminder, here are the deadlines that have been on the website:

Before Feb 1st- Eligible for Research Awards
Before Mar 1st- Eligible for Committee Awards

Good luck!

Samantha

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