Aurora joined the Edinburgh Earth Initiative as a postgraduate Earth Fellow following an accomplished early career as a journalist, non-profit founder, and UN programme employee. She is keen to contribute to systemic change to bring about sustained impact, particularly in the net zero transition.
From biomedical engineer to journalist
Aurora’s academic and professional path is marked by strategic career pivots, where she’s gone in search of high impact positions that address environmental problems.
As an undergraduate, she knew she wanted to help people and the environment but was not sure how to make this a reality. Ultimately, she settled on biomedical engineering. She credits this choice with giving her a foundation for shaping her ability to think critically.
After graduating she began her career as a journalist exploring urgent environmental challenges, which opened her mind. She wanted to learn more about these new issues. Through this, however, she discovered her true passion was seeking solutions to those complex problems rather than documenting the issues themselves. She wanted to know what she and her audiences could do?
Aurora’s journey to zero waste
At this point in her life, Aurora reflected further on how to align her values with action. Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man became the inspiration for her next journey, leading her to take on her own zero waste lifestyle and to found the non-profit Zero Waste Malaysia that is still in operation today.
When faced with the effects of climate change, Aurora found that she felt hypocritical contributing to those issues. It was necessary for her to align her passion for tackling these problems with her day-to-day behaviours. This change took place, quite literally, overnight.
On January 1, 2016, Aurora began her one-year zero waste challenge. She acknowledges that this was quite an extreme experiment, realising that there were many habits she was unaware of when making this shift initially. Despite the difficult transition to zero waste, she still found room for humour. A few days into her experiment, Aurora realised that she could no longer eat instant noodles because of the individual packaging – the horror!
Expanding horizons at the University of Edinburgh
She also gained experience in waste management at an international level by working on several government-funded environmental projects under the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). This led to another realisation. Aurora was self-taught when it came to managing environmental projects and she felt that this was becoming a hinderance to her professional growth and the impact she wanted to have.
She is now studying an MSc in Carbon Management at Edinburgh and contributing to the Edinburgh Earth Initiative’s (EEI) engagement with its academic and global partners as an Earth Fellow. Aurora’s projects include supporting Earth Observation –supporting rewilding of the Beldorney estate, Aberdeenshire using Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) technology – and Earth Data Hub– planning a prototype to scale up the database into a platform for researchers –and leading communications for Energy.ed, networking with its key internal and external stakeholders.
Edinburgh Earth Initiative – a bridge within the University
Edinburgh Earth Initiative has provided Aurora with opportunities to bring her professional and research skills together for a common purpose and to connect with different groups and individuals at the University of Edinburgh working on important climate change research.
She believes that the breakthroughs needed to combat climate change can be found within those spaces. So many brilliant people at the University often find themselves working in silos, meaning that there is a lot of unknowing doubling up on work, research costs, and other resources.
Edinburgh Earth Initiative is well positioned to bridge those gaps and help amplify the benefits of the work going on within the University. Similarly, she sees the Earth Fellowship as a means to apply lessons learned in class to real world projects and benefit the community as a whole.
What’s next?
Aurora is not set on an exact career path following her year at the University, but she hopes to influence systemic change at the level of a multinational corporation or within a government institution. Regardless of where she finds herself, you can be sure that she will be leading by example. As Aurora points out, “Life is short! We need to make the most impact we can.”
Aurora’s top tips for switching to a zero waste lifestyle
Aurora recommends that those thinking of switching to a zero waste lifestyle consider the following:
- It can be more difficult to follow this lifestyle in the Global North, where packaging is used so liberally in grocery stores. If zero waste is not an option, people can purchase expiring or recently expired items, which are often discounted.
- Environmentally friendly options may be price prohibitive. Individuals can give themselves some grace and recognize that the system they are living in may not be set up to empower these changes. It is alright to not be perfect on the zero waste journey but worth trying to make changes where one can.
- Read as much as possible to learn about new opportunities and methods of reducing consumption.
