United Nations debate: DENMARK

For this exercise myself and Sam were representatives of Denmark (whoop whoop), and i must admit that i was kind of relieved when i realised that they had got plenty of sustainable strategies in place, and actually were at the forefront of sustainability. We managed to get information about most of their strategies quite quickly, the harder thing would be to talk about everything in just 5 minutes, and what suggestions of improvements could we offer for a country who seem to be doing everything already!

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I didn't really know much about Denmark as a country, and absolutely zero about it's sustainable strategies prior to doing this exercise, and was pleasantly surprised about how much they had going on. I suppose I always thought that all countries within the EU would be doing the same sort of thing when it came to sustainability, and so always used England as my bench mark for whats good. This exercise has opened my eyes to that, and makes me wonder why we as a country don't adopt some of these strategies. Only 7% of waste being put in landfills, is definitely something to aspire to as a country! Hearing about the other countries sustainable ideas, also made me realise how much the economy influences how sustainable you are; whether it's not being able to input ideas because you can't afford it, or that you haven't got other options to how you manage things already.

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Overall I think our presentation went alright, but it could have been soooooooo much better if we had been stricter with our time, and kept to the point. One of the main elements of the exercise was to identify what you would do differently if you had the money, and we ran out of time to do justice to this. I felt that I was quite clear when speaking, tryed to make eye contact with the others at the table, and hopefully my nerves didn't show too much (because I was absolutely brickin it!). I think Sam and I worked together quite well, and as a team we complemented each other when presenting, we could have met up a few more times possibly to rehearse before hand though and to finalise details.

From this exercise I learnt alot about sustainability strategies in other countries (in particular Denmark). If I were to do the assignment again, I would be more strict about time keeping, and if their was the option to factor in a time for questions. When producing a handout I would also offer a bit more detail for people on the different aspects, instead of assuming the knowledge of the audience (for example I assumed everyone knew about the agenda 21, but they might not have). Overall I quite enjoyed this exercise, and will be alot less stressed if I had to do a debate again.