Participants in this Summit will have the opportunity to further their project ideas through the United Nations Association, allowing them to find additional collaborators, present at UNA/UN conferences, and work on the SDGs in their local community with like-minded UN advocates.
The United Nations Association has never related to me in any aspect until this convention. It was a four-hour summit for students to learn and research SDG, Sustainable Development Goals, which first introduced me to a global perspective on developmental issues. Before the start of the meeting, I followed the instructions of viewing the SDGs’ website and writing down some questions that I focused on. It was a great opportunity for me to explore this concept and build my ideas from an international student’s perspective. I see the relationship between each country as they all put effort into the same goals. In Particular, a recent government summit in China discussed the utilization of element carbon needed to be climaxed in 2030 and neutralized in 2060. After brainstorming SDGs by myself, I realized that the world is a community with a shared future for human beings.
In the first hour of the meeting, the founder of this activity introduced the summit and welcomed the speaker, Luis Enrique Garcia, to talk about SDGs from an ecologist and educator’s point of view. He pointed out that during the last 25 years, peaceful relationships were established, as well as all kinds of trades. Then he induced the problem: solutions of issues could cause new problems, so what are the effective moves? For example, many people opposed the policies for wildfire because it intervened in the natural environment. His ideas prompted me to think through SDGs again but from a different angle. Even though as the human develops more and more technologies, new problems are caused that can cause greater damages, there is no way to neglect the necessity of developments. Hence, I realize that SDGs are also restrictions for each country to remind the destruction created by people. Living with high qualities is not the ultimate goal for technological development; instead, living sustainably with responsibilities represents the final success.
Moving forward with the summit, students were separated into many groups discussing the cluster from SDGs that they were assigned with. Amazingly, I was able to research with five other friendly and creative partners on reasonable production and consumption. They all came from different countries, and we had a great time communicating and working on the final project for an hour. I was in charge of finding examples of countries enacting acts or laws to sustain reasonable production and consumption. In the end, we successfully finished the presentation. I felt the relationship between us became stronger just like connections between countries.
To sum up, this was a valuable experience to study global issues and develop my thoughts through research, communications, and presentations. Gradually, I understand the importance of students learning about not only SDGs but all global events. Even though the utilization of the knowledge has been revealed to students, we explore in these fields and develop our own abilities to achieve new goals and protect the world together in the future.