By Dirpal Shah, Taipei American School
In April 2019, TAS hosted the Taipei American School Model United Nations (TASMUN) conference. Over 600 participants attended from countries all over Asia. Unlike conventional MUN conferences, the themes of this conference were MUN Impact and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). MUN Impact is a global project of Model United Nations that focuses on informing, inspiring, and motivating MUN participants to action in support of the SDGs to solve global issues. The SDGs act as a blueprint – a set of goals created by the United Nations that they hope to achieve by 2030. At this conference, we presented about how our project on the Detection of Agricultural Residues addresses three Goals: Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), Goal 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure), and Goal 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). In addition to a presentation, we were asked to create a short video describing our project and the goals we addressed. This video was shown to the delegates of the conference and the delegates were asked to vote on the project that was most impactful accordingly to the SDGs.
We were honored to be able to rank the highest in this vote and receive the General Assembly Award of the 2019 TASMUN MUN Impact. We decided to donate our winnings to Tse Xin, an organization dedicated to sustainable agricultural practices that look to prevent misuse of land and that is devoted to countering the harmful effects of carbon dioxide emissions.