By Sammy Witt

August 21, 2017

So this week I didn’t actually get to attend an event on UN grounds. It seems that the NGO posse has completely gone off on vacation. I can’t criticize them though, because I think we all should take way more vacation than we do at the moment. So instead of attending an actual, physical meeting, I took part in a webinar, which is something I’ve never done before. First time for everything. 

The UN is made up of many subgroups and branches.  Some of the most important specialized agencies include UNICEF (the United Nations Children’s Fund), UNDP (United Nations Development Program) and UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees). Another one is UNEP, the United Nations Environment Program, funded in 1972. It promotes the wise use and sustainable development of the global environment.

The webinar I attended was organized by UNEP and DHI (Danish Hydraulic Institute), a software and engineering consulting company. Even though they’re a private corporation, they work closely with different UN agencies. In fact the UN has a lot more contact with private corporations than you might think.  The UNEDP-DHI collaboration has been in existence since 1996. They even have their own headquarters in Copenhagen. The DHI presents itself as a not-for-profit-foundation but that doesn’t mean that they are by any means a small or charitable organization. The Hørsholm-based company has over 1100 people working for them with offices in 30 different countries. In 2015 their revenue was 119.5M €. Even though I’m slightly suspicious of the organization, as you might have noticed, they have developed some ground-breaking software. They have developed different modeling programs, each of them incredibly complicated because of how notoriously difficult it is to map and simulate waves. I must admit that to understand the full complexity of the talks and presentations given at the webinar you would have to study marine biology and physics. Or at least it felt that way.

Webinars are cool because they help make information more accessible, by making it possible to stream an interactive presentation from the other side of the globe. But I really do prefer having actual people around me. So real life seminars will continue being my focus.