Joana Perrone, the Secretary-General of OxfordMUN 2020, explains the thinking behind the decision to use the Sustainable Development Goals as the basis for our 2020 conference, ‘A Decade of Action’.
When our Secretariat sat down to discuss what our 2020 Home Conference theme would look like, I asked everyone what they considered to be the main issues affecting our world today. We discussed a range of ideas, from hunger to migration to health provision, but one issue came up again and again in our answers: ‘climate change’.
It became very clear to us that in order to address the issues that we thought most prominent in 2020, we had to be ambitious in our thinking. It was this ambition that prompted our discussion about the 2015 General Assembly of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. The Agenda is a transformative document, focussing on seventeen different areas to build a better, more inclusive, and more sustainable world for all.
Since this year marks the 10-year countdown to achieving the SDGs set out by the UN, we plan to incorporate them into our conference, particularly because sustainable development is key to resolving all the issues that we had raised and plays a crucial role in climate action.
When I asked what the Secretariat considered the best part of MUN, each and every one of our team members said: ‘the delegates’; we were united in our belief that it is young people who will catalyse change in the world. Therefore, it is our collective objective to set up a space in which our delegates would take the lead in discussing issues that impact the whole world.
The principle behind the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is ‘leaving no one behind’. In a conference that is both diverse and international, we wanted to reaffirm this commitment by providing a place where every delegate from every country could propose their ideas and bring forth issues that might affect particular regions.
From gender equality to clean water and sanitation for all, from reducing inequalities to building sustainable communities and cities, the SDGs are all-encompassing and provide fertile ground for ideas to flourish. They are also integrated, affecting and informing each other in a variety of ways.
The broadness of the SDGs has allowed us to devise broad topics for the 2020 committee sessions. We held several talks on how to ensure that all of our delegates will have their interests represented in the different committees for our 2020 Home Conference.
Spanning many subject areas, our team members were able to create compelling and urgent topics that would speak to the different interests of our delegates.
Last year, the theme of our conference was ‘A Decade in Review’, which looked back on the most important issues that had touched the UN and the international stage since 2010. This year, we are looking ahead, proposing ‘A Decade of Action’ and trying to anticipate some of the challenges that will affect our world in the upcoming years.
We hope to incorporate these characteristics into OxfordMUN 2020, creating a space in which delegates will learn not only from their committees but also from the conference as a whole. The team is working very hard on some new and exciting committees that I personally cannot wait to share.
This decade is shaping up to be an exciting and challenging era for everyone. Thinking ahead is the way in which we will grow, individually and collectively, and transform the world and how we relate to it. It is this idea that sits at the core of the Sustainable Development Goals, and it is for this reason that we choose them as the basis for our 2020 conference.