COMUN 2012 - 2nd - 4th March

The 2 conference topics for Ecosoc, in which i was the delegate of Japan were: The risks of nuclear energy to environmentally sustainable development, and The sustainable usage of resources in the developing and developed world.

The committee i was in - the UN economic and social council, discusses and coordinates financial and social work through UN agencies. since the theme for this COMUN was energy, the topics were chosen to reflect this.ecosoc has 51 members, and so is reasonably smaller than the general assemblies which have around 180, but is bigger than the security council which has 17. ecosocs mandate falls only with economic issues and delegates cannot call on the military as in the security council, and cannot focus on other issues like human rights or demilitarization.

on the first day which was at school, the topic to be discussed was the issue of nuclear power. After the fukushima daichi nuclear plant accident, japan has become very anti-nuclear, and so my stance in the debate would be to move against the building of nuclear plants. To start with, the floor was opened for speeches, and it became very obvious that most of the house was pro-nuclear. therefore i tried to make my speeches less anti-nuclear but more pro-renewable, however the arguments against this were that nuclear produced much more power that renewable sources. So in retaliation i had to make clear the dangers and risks of nuclear power. during the moderated caucusing - which is essentially a debate within a debate - many solutions were brought up to make nuclear safer, as well as concerns about whether we can actually make it safe,  whether uranium will last us into the future and the issue of radioactive waste. during the practice debates one of my arguments against using nuclear was its extremely high cost and how it was unrealistic for LIC's to use it, but since the topic was about environmentally sustainable development, its viability for developing countries really didn't come into effect. afterwards the house moved into un-moderated caucusing in which resolutions for the topic were drafted. the house split into three groups - 2 pro-nuclear groups and 1 anti-nuclear group of which i was the main sponsor. with few anti-nuclear countries in ecosoc i tried to convince the poor countries, with no real nuclear agendas to join my resolution, however my group was still significantly smaller than the other 2. Therefore i would have to make my resolution less anti-nuclear than i wanted so that countries in the other groups might vote for it. rather than forcing countries to stop nuclear expansion, the resolution stressed shifting the emphasis onto renewable and also included clauses encouraging research into nuclear safety. after the resolutions were typed up the house moved into debate about my resolution, and although it didn't have that many flaws, and could have been a viable resolution - it was still too anti-nuclear for most countries to vote for it and so it failed. the second resolution discussed was sponsored by the delegate of china.