BERMUN2 2019: Advancing Climate Action
From 28 February to 2 March 2019, our Model United Nations Club, IMZMUN, journeyed to Berlin to partake in the BERMUN2 conference held at the Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung. At MUN conferences students simulate the work of the United Nations and hence gain insight into international politics and the work of the United Nations, while improving their communication skills and collaborating to find practical solutions to global problems. The theme of this year’s BERMUN2 conference was “Advancing Climate Action: The Key to a Sustainable Future.” Schools from all over the world participated including countries such as England, Mexico and Switzerland.
As mentioned in a previous article, Lloyd Weber was Assistant President of the ECOSOC and he aims to chair their main conference which will be held in November. Thinking back on the experience, Lloyd said, “Chairing the BERMUN2 has been a truly eye-opening experience. Working with a large staff of highly informed student officers has been a real pleasure, I learned a lot about climate change and the overall MUN procedure from them. The dedication of the other student officers is second to none and I am honoured to have been able to contribute to such an amazingly organised conference. I had a great time and loved the guest speakers that talked about ‘Global Heating’ and learned a lot of new things on the topic. Overall, it was a fantastic opportunity and a great honour.”
Victoria Malysheva acted as Ambassador of Syria and addressed the General Assembly with an opening speech. “The BERMUN2 was my first time being an Ambassador. Even though I was very scared to give an opening speech in front of a large audience,” reflects Victoria, “I think it was a great experience for me. I learned to speak confidently in front of many people by attending conferences like this. To sum it up, it was a very memorable trip.”
In attendance was also Norman Rehlis, who can now mark this conference down as his fourth one and who will hopefully be one of our future chairmen. Gabriel Alcober joined for the first time and Marie Arfelt, Zhoulin “Lily” Liu and Ruiqian “Ray” Xu were able to experience their first conference away from school. As Lily recalls, “BERMUN2 was my first MUN conference. On the first day when we were lobbying, it wasn’t even clear what I had to do and I barely spoke because of my shyness. However, in the end, I ended up debating a lot and really enjoyed it. I received good feedback on my speech and had a really nice experience.”
As for the importance of the Model United Nations in general, our IMZMUN supervisor, Paul-Johan Widen, stated that, “Generation Z – the current generation of middle and high school students – are growing up in a world where the importance of 21st century skills, like critical thinking, collaboration, communication, information literacy, leadership, imitative, commitment, etc. are ever increasing. The Model United Nations programme is the perfect venue to develop these skills by combining the elements of academia and an enriching extracurricular activity.”
Mr. Widen will also be the IMZMUN Conference Director for our own Model United Nations conference to be held on our campus at Institut Montana Zugerberg on 25-27 October 2019. Be sure to hear more about this in the next upcoming weeks.