Topic: Promoting Ecologically Sound Development Strategies
Country: Syria
Delegate Name: Lauren Rechner
School: Forest Hills Eastern High School
Topic page: background guide and all position papers All Syria position papers GLIMUN 2016 committees
In order to sustain and improve human well-being, healthy ecosystems and biodiversity is essential. Over the past few decades, loss of biodiversity threatens sustainable development and a stable life for humans. The main threats to biodiversity are forest fires, uncontrolled urbanization, excessive hunting and fishing, and lack of appropriate regulation. Due to the civil unrest, sustainable development has been put on the back-burner. The United Nations defines sustainable development as development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Currently, we are trying to stay alive throughout the day and we are not overly concerned with the environment. Another large issue is that 1.2 billion people on the Earth live in poverty. These people depend on the resources from their local ecosystems to survive. For them, this is also matter of life and death. This is an important for the Syrian Arab Republic because it is mostly desert. Desert means fewer resources for those in poverty. Syria believes that the natural resources are publicly owned and that we, the state, as a whole will invest in benefitting all people.
After Hafez al-Assad died in 2000, his son Bashar succeeded him. Established in 1992, the Syrian Environmental Protection Society (SEPS) was formed to help organize the main problems that needed to be addressed for the country as a whole. Assad took a few actions on their proposals. For example, thousands of wells were dug to tap into underground aquifers. Our goal is to improve air quality, encourage the use of clean and environment-friendly public transportation, improve fuel quality and encourage the use of green diesel. The United Nations Development Program in our country provided technical support for the national reports preparation.
Syria as a whole believes that environmental issues are a huge conflict in many countries. We recommend that the country as a whole decides together. This way there are less civil conflicts in the country. We would not be very involved in the decision making for environmental issues because that is currently not our focus, however we would like to see other countries get more involved. First and foremost our goal is to settle all of the civil unrest in our country. Next our main focus is to unite Syria as one compact country.
