UNESCO

Hi delegates, only one more week until BMUN LXVI!! I hope you are all as excited as I am for conference to begin this Friday. With this in mind, I wanted to give a quick update regarding various BMUN policies, and the technology policy in particular. BMUN has traditionally been a non-technology conference, but in recent years, changes have been made regarding this policy. This year, we will have three different types of committees in regards to technology, that have been decided by each individual committee. As you may or may not have seen on the UNESCO page, UNESCO will be a "unmod tech" committee, where technology is only allowed for the purposes of resolution writing during unmoderated caucus. We do encourage you to bring your laptops and tablets to conference if you can, but if you can't, don't worry! There will still be plenty of ways for you to be involved. With this being said however, only laptops and/or tablets will be permitted in committee - other electr...

http://www.borgenmagazine.com/sustainable-agriculture-in-gabon/ This article gives a really good overview over the country Gabon’s recent policy implementations made to better the sustainability of their agriculture. With President Ondimba’s new interest in expanding the agricultural sector, Gabon has began making enormous strides towards better agricultural practices. By decreasing imports, expanding the agricultural sector, and by combating environmental factors such as the Tsetse fly, Gabon has become a model country for other African nations in the region. These programs are already starting to show great results since their introduction in 2016, improving the agricultural employment by over 10%. When reading this article try to think of how such programs could be implemented in other countries?  Could other Sub-saharan African nations show similar results? Would such a program work in other regions outside of Africa? For further information on the Emerging Gabon Strateg...

Hi delegates, I hope everything has been going well for you all these last few weeks. With conference just less than three weeks away (I hope you're all excited!), a few of our upcoming posts will discuss some things that are going to be important during conference weekend. For this post, we'll be talking about crises and what that means for you. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, we have several crises for both topics planned for you all, and these crises are going to be spread out over the course of the weekend. So what should you expect? Well to be honest, I can't say for sure - how the committee adapts to the crisis is largely on how you all choose to respond. Crises in committee will be a combination of urgent events and news updates - each of these crises are events that we as a dais anticipate will happen between now and 2030, and they will vary in terms of their urgency. When a crisis starts, we won't necessarily introduce anything you're not fami...

            As we have read in the topic synopsis and previous blog posts, droughts and famines can bring political unrest with them. Scientists point out that these events will only become more common and extreme with climate change. Many parts of the world are currently under drought, and one of those places in Iran. This has been one of the driest years in recent history for Iran and the future doesn’t look much better as it is predicted that Iran will close the rain year at 80% below average rainfall. Iran’s Drought and Crisis Management Center has declared that 96% of Iran’s land is under “prolonged drought conditions.”             One of the biggest problems that this drought has brought to Iran is water scarcity. Farmers in rural areas do not have enough water to farm and as the LA Times article points out, there have been protests by farmers who fe...

Many children, due to widening inequality, have lost the possibility of upward mobility within India.  Often times the quality of living is directly related to the quality of education. Therefore, children living in impoverished areas do not learn on as high of a level as those in wealthy areas. In many cases, statistics focus on the rate of children who are attending school; however, this is not the only factor that should be taken into consideration. Although roughly 98% of children in India attend primary school, many tests have shown that, despite growing attendance, there are many basic skills which children are lacking. These schools in poorer areas have children in them but do not teach them at the proper level. Many children lack basic skills such as how to read a clock or the capital city. This has created a growing gap between the wealthy and the poor within the nation. This inequality is a major concern as it also can hurt the children’s motivation to attend school. Wit...

To follow up on the article on the projected maize and wheat production in the world due to climate change, New York times has  this article  by Jacques Leslie that provides a possible solution to both potentials food shortage and global warming. The author describes how a method of carbon sequestration can help solve both. " Now scientists are documenting how sequestering carbon in soil can produce a double dividend: It reduces climate change by extracting carbon from the atmosphere, and it restores the health of degraded soil and increases agricultural yields. Many scientists and farmers believe the emerging understanding of soil’s role in climate stability and agricultural productivity will prompt a paradigm shift in agriculture ,..." The article is pretty loaded with one of the solution that have become popular among environmental scientists. Read and ask any questions you might have.

Oftentimes, it's easy to think of climate change as a global phenomenon - which of course, it is - but in doing so, we tend to forget the specific impact that it can have on local and regional communities. In cases like Iran's, environmental changes and dissatisfaction with the government have resulted in protests, political tension, and uprisings. The LA Times released a piece a few weeks ago (which can be found here ) that details some of the ongoing problems that Iran has been facing, especially in regards to climate change and drought. Dissatisfaction with the current regime seems to stem particularly from how the Iranian people believe the government is handling the crisis. As the problem continues to grow, Iran's lakes have dried up, dust storms have been aggravated, and fertile agricultural regions have grown barren, displacing local farmers and small-scale agriculture. Thousands of natural springs have dried up, and according to the article, Shahrokh Fateh, the di...