There is something quietly humbling about working across time zones with people you will never physically meet, in communities whose landscapes you can only imagine. My remote internship with ThinkPacific in September 2025 brought Fiji to my laptop screen, its rural health clinics, its people navigating the quiet crisis of non-communicable diseases with limited resources and extraordinary resilience. I never booked a flight. And yet, it was the most far-reaching journey I have ever taken.
Studying Biology at Bath Spa University has made the abstract devastatingly concrete. I know that aviation’s warming effect is disproportionate to its headline emissions figure. I know that the communities most vulnerable to climate change are often the least responsible for it. Fiji is one of them. Working alongside Fijian health partners to develop a funding proposal for the Wellness Fiji initiative, I was struck by an uncomfortable truth: travelling *to* witness global inequality can itself deepen the environmental pressures that drive it. This is not an argument against international experience, it is an argument for doing it thoughtfully.
When ThinkPacific offered a remote collaboration, I embraced it as a deliberate choice, not a compromise. Eliminating long-haul travel entirely directly supported UN SDG 13: Climate Action. Beyond that, I kept communications efficient, maintained digital-only records, and structured my working hours to reduce unnecessary energy use. Small measures, but sustainability is built through consistent, accumulated choices.
The work itself was rooted in SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being and SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities researching health interventions for rural Fijian communities and contributing to a proposal that reached the Ministry of Health. This reinforced something my healthcare placements across NHS departments had already taught me: protecting the environment and protecting human health are not separate projects. They are the same one.
That experience also shaped how I approached cross-cultural collaboration. I listened before I spoke, asked questions before assuming, and recognised that my understanding of Fijian communities would always be partial. That posture of humility is itself sustainable thinking. Eco-friendly travel is not only about carbon footprints, it is about arriving, physically or digitally, with enough respect to ask: what does this community need, and how can I be useful without extracting more than I give?
Looking forward, I am committed to prioritising lower-emission transport for any future placements, offsetting unavoidable flights through verified schemes, and extending visit durations to maximise impact per journey. I will continue seeking locally led organisations where international contributors genuinely complement rather than displace local expertise.
Fiji never left my screen, but it has not left my thinking either which is why this summer I plan to attend a 3-week experience with ThinkPacific to gain the physical experience that remote communication could not provide. The true measure of a sustainable placement lies not only in its carbon footprint, but in whether the work endures, the relationships carry genuine respect, and the person who returns uses what they learned to push the world, however incrementally, toward something fairer and cleaner.
I intend to.
