Children for Children. I organized and coordinated a fundraising activity in my home town for child victims in Iraq, working together with local youth organizations like the scouts, to help sensitize children and youth to what is happening in the world.

Myclimate (www.myclimate.org). This organization tries to tackle emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the major problems in industrialized countries. We focus on flight emissions, as air traffic is increasing rapidly. Plane passengers are invited to buy an extra ticket ($5 per hour of flight), and the money is used to compensate for the emissions produced by replacing generators powered by fossil fuels with renewable energy sources such as solar panels and biogas plants. Projects worth several hundred thousand dollars are under way in Costa Rica, Eritrea, India and South Africa.

Seed. This student organization aims to bring together stakeholders from science - like professors and students - and stakeholders from society and the economy to find sustainable solutions to practical problems. The projects are interdisciplinary, involving students from different disciplines, so as to guarantee innovative ideas.

Studio!Sus. This is a student guide to sustainable development that we, in the student organization for sustainability, publish every half year. Each issue has a main topic, most recently consumption, and it includes interesting articles from scientists and representatives from non-governmental organizations (NGOs), business and society. It introduces local NGOs, lists sustainability-related lectures and gives tips on how to make student life more sustainable.

Zurich to Tokyo in 19 days. Fast does not necessarily mean better. We (part of the world student community for sustainable development) wanted to demonstrate that alternative ways of travelling and vacation can be much more fun and provide many more experiences than flying far away and taking part in unsustainable mass tourism. So we travelled from Zurich to Tokyo for three weeks by train and ferry, filming our unforgettable experiences. These included discovering the Siberian landscape, talking to Mongolians using our hands and feet, enjoying the slowness of the journey and the time to reflect, trying foreign food, and finally arriving thousands of miles away in a very different culture which had now come so close.

PHOTOS: NICOLE MEYER