I also attended last year (you can see my rather silly blow-by-blow account here.
So, for the past two days, I have been caught up in SydMUN 2011, a Model United nations conference held by the University of Sydney where university students roleplay delegates from member countries and argue with each other about global issues. As you might expect, ridiculousness ensues.
To get some idea of the mayhem, a quick Twitter search of #sydmun2011 may give you an idea. Alternately, good coverage was provide by the International Press Gallery (IPG) delegates, who did an excellent job of being sneaky reporters. Their work is here: The Working Paper 2011.
Being Canada in the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), on the topic of the Famine in East Africa, I really didn't have much to say... Or at least, I told myself I hadn't.
I had sprained my foot a few days before and simply didn't feel like speaking. If I had felt like speaking, I probably have brought more science into the debate. And given that this was the United Nations Environmental Program, and that only two people in the room (myself included) had a scientific background, that probably would have been a good idea.
As it was, it was only on the second day that I psyched myself up enough to deliver a five minute lecture on why exactly the famine is occurring in East Africa. Which, the Press Delegate helpfully pointed out, probably should have been done on the first day. I know. I KNOW, OKAY.
And now, I will lecture you all.
Currently, East Africa, also known as the Horn of Africa (think of countries such as Somalia, Kenya, etc.) is experiencing a pretty nasty drought.
Rains have failed throughout the year, reducing crop/vegetation growth. This is a problem. the UN has declared the region to be suffering from famine.
This drought has been attributed, in the main, to the La Nina phase of the ENSO cycle. This means, in simple terms:
- Strong winds from the west across Africa, and, as this means winds coming from the land, not the ocean...
- Little rainfall.
TIME has also done a very interesting piece on this.
However, La Nina and its counterpart El Nino are considered very high-frequency climatic events. They occur on seasonal time period, which is very quick in climate terms.
At the same time, longer-term climate events are occurring at the same time. The Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) refers to two areas of very different temperatures in the Indian Ocean. The temperatures in the two places alternate on an interannual scale.
The IOD is currently negative, that is, the ocean off the coast of East Africa is cold, whilst the eastern Indian Ocean is warm. Cold means lack of rain.
So La Nina + negative IOD = a hell of a drought.
Both UNICEF and UN Refugees are taking donations, it seems, but with predictions that warming seas will only exacerbate the drought conditions into the foreseeable future, the people in the region will have to learn how to deal with it ... or leave, as so many are doing.
Back to SydMUN, the Crisis Council thoroughly enjoyed themselves replaying the tussle between the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. Chairman Mao was successfully assassinated, but the CCP still had victory, banishing the KMT to Formosa (now Taiwan).
The Security Council was involved in a water rights dispute between India and Pakistan over water resources, which quickly escalated into all out war when a dam was blown up, killing Chinese nationals and President Obama, visiting India, was assassinated along with the Indian President.
When this was tweeted by the Press Delegate representing Fox News, there was general panic as the MUN Secretariat worried that a third party reading the tweet would think the real President Obama was actually dead. Not so guys, it's just a mask:
The International Criminal Court (ICC) hypothetically considered what the trial of Muammar Gaddafi would have been like ... if he wasn't dead already.
He was almost unanimously found guilty of crimes against humanity, with the sole dissent from a Justice who pointed out that Gaddafi's arrest and spiriting away to the ICC was against a particular principle of international law. Unfortunately, as I have not yet undertaken international law at university, I didn't quite understand it. That should be rectified by the middle of next year.
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And now its over until the next time a MUN comes around. I'm currently tossing up between AMUNC and volunteer work in Vietnam, so nothing definite yet. As they say, we will see.
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