Amsterdam taught me to measure distance in canals. Edinburgh, I’m learning, measures it in carbon budgets. When I booked my route north for the upcoming semester, I skipped the one-hour flight and chose the Eurostar–LNER connection instead, a longer journey that cuts my trip’s emissions by roughly 80% compared to flying. It felt like a strange trade at first: more hours for less impact. But that trade is exactly what SDG 13, Climate Action, asks of individuals, not major gestures, but consistent small choices. Edinburgh made the decision easy to justify: the university’s regenerative sustainability strategy commits to becoming carbon net negative by 2040, and I wanted my arrival to align with that ambition.
Once there, I don’t intend to let that commitment end at the platform. SDG 4, Quality Education, is really the engine behind everything else Edinburgh is doing on sustainability, and I plan to plug into it directly. The Edinburgh Futures Institute runs a course that treats the university itself as a “living lab” for sustainable development, and the institution has pledged to train thousands of staff and students in carbon and biodiversity literacy by 2030. As an exchange student, I could easily treat sustainability as background noise, someone else’s institutional target. Instead, I want to actually participate in literacy training and bring what I learn back to Amsterdam, where I can share it with my faculty’s sustainability society.
Another goal I’m building my semester around is SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, because a semester abroad isn’t just one flight or train. It’s three months of daily micro-decisions. Edinburgh’s compact geography and investment in cycling infrastructure make this genuinely achievable. I plan to get a Just Eat Cycle membership rather than default to taxis, use the city’s bus network for anything beyond walking distance, and spend time in the Forest and Peatland program’s green spaces, not only as a tourist attraction, but also as a way of understanding what “regenerative” sustainability looks like in reality, not just on paper.
None of this works without the right tools I used: Seat61 to plan low-carbon rail routes across Europe, Rome2Rio to compare journey emissions before booking anything, Ecosia as my default search engine so ordinary browsing plants trees, and Too Good To Go to cut food waste once I’m settled in Edinburgh.
Amsterdam gave me a city built around the idea that infrastructure shapes behaviour. Edinburgh is giving me the chance to test that idea somewhere new: to see whether a long train ride, a bike membership, and a few deliberate habits makes one exchange semester a small, honest contribution to a much larger goal.
References
• Seat61: www.seat61.com
• Rome2Rio: www.rome2rio.com
• Ecosia: www.ecosia.org
• Too Good To Go: www.toogoodtogo.com
• Just Eat Cycle Edinburgh: www.justeatcycles.com/edinburgh
Sources on University of Edinburgh sustainability commitments:
• University of Edinburgh Regenerative Sustainability strategy: www.ed.ac.uk/regenerative-sustainability
• University of Edinburgh sustainability rankings and Strategy 2030: sustainability.ed.ac.uk/university-of-edinburgh-ranked-7th-globally-for-sustainability
• Edinburgh Futures Institute course, “Sustainable Development Goals: History, Progress and Beyond 2030”: www.drps.ed.ac.uk/25-26/dpt/cxefie08008.htm
