Is the United Nations relevant today?

I recently attended the 2016 United Nations International Youth Day at the UN Headquarters in New York. The conference theme was, “The Road to 2030: Eradicating Poverty and Achieving Sustainable Consumption and Production.”  They talked about 17 huge goals, among them: how they want to try to decrease poverty, eradicate hunger, make production of food and manufactured products more environmentally safe, make consumption of food sustainable, green affordable energy, economic growth, gender equality and more. 

While I sat there I thought to myself, “What makes this relevant?” then I took it one step further and asked, “What makes the U.N. relevant today?” When I started to research and look into this more, I was shocked at how important and interesting the U.N., its projects and the political and diplomatic atmosphere, is.

The U.N. is working very hard to improve the lives of children through the program, UNICEF. It works to protect the environment through sustainable development goals that not only affect the environment but also growing economies in developing countries. Here are what I think are the more important and interesting goals I heard mentioned: affordable clean energy and clean water and sanitation.

I think affordable and clean energy is one of the more important goals because it is a large problem that contributes to climate change, pollution, and habitat loss while still many people live without reliable and modern energy. According to the U.N., one in five people are without modern energy.  According to worldometers.info there are about 7.5 billion people in the world. Now, if we take about one-fifth of that population, there are about 1.5 billion people without modern energy. That is as if Canada, China, and Mexico went without energy.  Energy contributes 60 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions. One of the U.N.’s big goals is to have universal access to affordable and reliable modern energy services by 2030. 2030! That is only 14 years from now.

Clean water and sanitation are very important in today’s world. Due to globalization, someone who is sick and travels could cause a domino effect of illness. When they travel from one place to another, they could infect people. Then the infected people travel and infect other people and so on and so on. So if a person has a disease that spreads through bodily fluids, he or she could spread a disease like ebola. This U.N. goal may be achievable, but I wonder if it can be achieved by 2030.

There are many other important goals that you may find interesting and I suggest you visit their website at www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. There 15 other goals that could have whole books written about their subjects.  

Personally, I think that this is what makes the U.N. relevant today. The way they go about looking at and trying to fix such important problems and still are able to spend their time defusing political, economic and environmental disputes is amazing and very much relevant today. 

Jacob A. Finch lives in Kent with his parents. He’s a seventh-grade student at Kent Center School.