Sep 13, 2026
Crowd holding a protest sign with ‘Fight Today for a Better Tomorrow’, outdoors and during the day. by Markus Spiske via Pexels
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Sustainability, Who Will Still Be Doing This In 2031?
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By Dr Azizi Abu Bakar and Mohd Fadhli Rahmat Fakri
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Most of the students who registered for their first semester this year will graduate in 2030, the year the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) expire. They have spent their whole education being told the climate is their inheritance, and every survey of young people in this region says they believe it, often to the point of anxiety. What no one has told them is what comes after. UNESCO’s Education for Sustainable Development framework runs out on the same year, and while a successor agenda is under international discussion, nothing has been settled. Where sustainability effort has been built mainly as compliance with a global target, there is a real risk that when the scaffolding comes down, the building behind it turns out to be unfinished. We do not exempt ourselves from that risk.
What we have, at best, is a decade of small attempts and a reasonable amount of learning from the ones that did not last. It was sustained by people willing to do the unglamorous parts: sorting and weighing what the campus threw away until its recycling could be stated in numbers, standing in drains and streams to sample water, arguing for a forest to survive longer than their own tenure, making the case for sustainability from faith as comfortably as from science. Some of it held. Much of it faded quietly when the people behind it graduated or moved on, and those are the ones we think about most.
The pattern in the ones that held is not complicated. None began as a directive from above. Each began because a group of people found the work meaningful and asked to be let in. Volunteerism, not instruction, has been the calling factor.
That has taught us something we are still not good at. Inclusion in this work should not be rationed by seniority, qualification or apparent capability, and we have caught ourselves doing exactly that. A contract cleaner knows more about the campus waste stream than most of the people who write about it. A clerk who has worked in the same building for twenty years knows which rooms are cooled to no purpose. A first year student brings little except willingness, and willingness is definitely not a small thing. Sustainability may be one of the few institutional agendas where the least credentialled participant holds the most useful information, and where taking part is itself the training. Every time we have narrowed the invitation to those already expert, the circle has stopped widening.
Something else has happened alongside all this. Sustainability has become, to put it plainly, fashionable. Climate anxiety, green careers and environmental, social and governance (ESG) reporting have pushed the subject into the mainstream, and more volunteers arrive at our door than before. This is a gift and we would rather receive it than question it. The harder task is converting enthusiasm into capability before the fashion moves on, and we are still working out how.
That conversion is where the Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development (RCE) has been useful to us. RCE Central Semenanjung has been recognised by the United Nations University since 2014, and since January 2022 it has been hosted by the UM Sustainable Development Centre. An RCE is not a research unit. It is a network meant to connect a university with the schools, community groups, faith institutions, local authorities, businesses and international partners around it, so that education for sustainable development happens outside the lecture hall as well as inside it. In practice it has meant green educators from Penang benchmarking against our campus and students from RCE Tongyeong Sejahtera Forest in South Korea coming to compare notes with ours. We have learned at least as much from these visitors as they have from us.
On that point we want to be direct. The network is open and we would genuinely welcome more partners from outside academia. Companies with a sustainability function and nowhere to place it, non-governmental organisations needing a research partner, local authorities with a problem and no foundations looking for delivery capacity. Universities have no special claim on this agenda, and the work goes further when it is not attempted alone. If you are reading this and you have been looking for a way in, we would like to hear from you.
The value of that network for a student is easy to overlook. In a classroom a student is a recipient. Inside an RCE activity, a student becomes an educator. A third year undergraduate explaining composting to a group of ten year olds, or answering a visiting Korean student on why a campus bothers to protect a patch of forest, is doing something harder and more durable than passing an examination. They are being asked to own the argument in public. Very few of them forget it.
So how does any of this survive past 2030? Our working answer, offered tentatively, is that the goals were always the scaffolding and never the building. What outlasts a framework is the number of people who have taken on the habit, and the institutions that keep giving them somewhere to put it. There are things would help, and we are not yet doing any of them well.
Recognise the learning. Volunteering that teaches real competence should be documented as such, through micro-credentials or a co-curricular record a graduate can show an employer. It costs little and gives the volunteer a reason to go deep rather than merely attend.
Change what is counted. Counting participants tells us about a semester, which is why we do it. Asking what a cohort is doing five years later would tell us whether we changed anyone. We should be asking the second question.
Anchor to horizons beyond 2030. Malaysia’s net zero commitment runs to 2050. Planetary health, water security and biodiversity have no expiry date at all. If people understand their work as belonging to those longer horizons rather than to a numbered goal, whatever follows becomes a matter of relabelling rather than rebuilding.
Then there is the part we cannot organise, only hope for. Students who found something here go on to banks, ministries, schools, engineering firms and start-ups, and some of them look back. When a graduate returns with an offer to collaborate, to fund, to mentor a current cohort, or simply to tell the next intake what the work led to, it is worth more to us than any ranking submission. We have not made it easy for them to find their way back, and that is our failing rather than theirs. To those graduates we would say plainly that the door is open and the invitation stands.
The people volunteering on our campus today will be in mid-career by 2040 and running institutions by 2050. Whatever the goals are called by then, they are the ones who will be expected to deliver them. The task is not to hold their attention until 2030. It is to make sure that when the deadline passes they barely notice, because the work had already stopped being a target and become a way of doing things. We are some distance from that, and we would rather say so and get on with it.
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Sep 6, 2026
A woman in a graduation gown holding a mortarboard at Anıtkabir, Ankara, by Berna via Pexels
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Fake ranking sites target Global South universities – Study
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Fake Webometrics University Rankings (WURs) are targeting universities in the Global South, leading to the rise of dissemination of inaccurate ranking data through news outlets and consulting agencies.
But they have remained largely obscured from the European academic community due to Geo-IP masking tactics, which necessitate the adopting of institutional measures to enhance vigilance and safeguard the integrity and authority of academic rankings.
This is the outcome of a study that provided a comprehensive analysis of the fake Webometrics University Rankings (WURs) phenomenon observed in the first half of 2026 after investigating 300 publications gathered from 39 countries between 6 January and 6 July 2026.
Titled “Fake Webometrics University Rankings: Network expansion, Geo-IP cloaking, and institutional vulnerabilities in the global south”, the study was published on 18 August in Preprints.org – a free multidisciplinary platform providing a preprint service dedicated to making early versions of research outputs permanently available and citable.
The author of the study, independent researcher and consultant Dr Vladimir Moskovkin, said: “This study moves beyond identifying isolated web scams; it documents an aggressive, transnational ‘metric chimera’ economy”.
Moskovkin is the former director of the Centre for the Development of Publication Activity at Belgorod State National Research University, Russia, where he was also a professor in the university’s Department of World Economy.
He told University World News he was able to confirm obscuration in Europe because that is where he is based – in the Czech Republic – but he believes the fake rankings are also obscured in other developed countries, such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and surmises that the information campaigns involving fake rankings were targeted exclusively at countries in the Global South.
“The evolution from simple fake website clones (spring 2025/early 2026) to complex ‘July 2026 new wave’ domains (webometrics.one, webometrics.top, webometric.org) indicates that perpetrators are highly adaptive,” Moskovkin pointed out.
“By exposing how fake domains bypass European detection through Geo-IP masking and successfully penetrate official state documents and international recruitment portals (like SMAPSE or BAYHOST), the research highlights a systemic threat to the integrity of global higher education,” Moskovkin indicated.
“The scammers configured the server so that the fake webometrics.org content was displayed only to users from specific regions (South-East Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) – areas where the demand for rankings is highest and vigilance is lower,” Moskovkin pointed out.
“Therefore, safeguarding higher education requires a coordinated global response involving researchers, media watchdogs, and state accreditation bodies,” Moskovkin stressed.
Phenonomon driven by technologies
Moskovkin said: “The study reveals that approximately 65% of cases involving the dissemination of inaccurate ranking data were initiated by news outlets and consulting agencies.”
He noted that this proves that the phenomenon is “largely driven by PR technologies and information aggregation, rather than isolated errors by universities themselves”.
“The most striking finding is the pronounced geographical imbalance: 81.3% of fake publications originate from the Global South, with Indonesia acting as the primary epicentre (accounting for over 50% of all recorded publications), followed by Turkey (10.3%), Ukraine (8.7%) and both the Philippines and Egypt (7.0%),” Moskovkin added.
Other countries – totalling 34 countries, 23.3% of publications – include developing countries such as Montenegro, Jordan, Moldova, Uganda, and Yemen.
“The presence of developed nations (the US, Spain, Israel, the UK, Germany and Canada) is sporadic and associated with local marketing errors or the activity of international consulting and recruitment agencies.
“Overall, this confirms the transnational and opportunistic nature of the fake WUR market, penetrating any region in search of image-driven demand,” Moskovkin indicated.
“This shows that universities in developing regions, facing immense pressure regarding publication performance and rigid KPI/accreditation systems, are uniquely vulnerable to fake rankings and actively exploit them to simulate international prestige,” Moskovkin pointed out.
“Furthermore, the data demonstrates a clear Pareto distribution, where a small number of countries hold the vast majority of ‘fake webometric weight’, creating an institutionalised illusion of global success,” Moskovkin indicated.
Takeaway messages to HE policymakers
Asked about the most important takeaway messages for higher education policymakers and decision makers, Moskovkin said: “Policymakers and university leadership must realise that relying on unverified web metrics for national KPIs, hiring criteria, and institutional benchmarking creates a dangerous feedback loop of misinformation.”
He said ministries of higher education need to establish rigorous, independent audit mechanisms for academic metrics and rely solely on authentic, verified international repositories, such as the official data hosted on Figshare via the Cybermetrics Lab.
“An example of such successful work is the effort of the Center for Civic Education (CCE) in Montenegro, which, based on our research, succeeded in having an erroneous Order of the Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation of Montenegro revoked.
“The Order had been based on the fake webometrics.org ranking when hiring faculty for Montenegrin universities,” Moskovkin pointed out.
He said several actions must be taken to deal with the rise of the fake university ranking systems.
First, he said, official ranking providers and the academic community must take technical and legal action.
“Official providers must implement proactive legal and technical defences, while the academic community must establish global observatories.”
Moskovkin has published several studies and reports about fake university ranking sites in 2026, including the study titled “Pandemic of ‘Predatory’ Rankings: Why academic integrity fails the stress test” and the article titled “Predatory university rankings jeopardise the value of Webometrics”, and is involved in a group of higher education experts which is in the final stage of launching Global Observatory on Academic Metrics and University Rankings (GOAMUR), which will “continuously monitor, expose, and neutralise predatory ranking networks before they distort educational policy and consumer trust”.
Second, strategies identified in the group’s research must be implemented.
“These include the urgent restoration of the official webometrics.info portal as a single source of truth, the enforcement of strict verification protocols that require universities to cross-check any ranking claims solely against authentic repositories (such as the official Figshare archive), and the establishment of global monitoring systems to inform regulators about the geo-targeting tactics used by scammers to bypass detection,” Moskovkin said.
Third, GOAMUR is preparing an open letter to the ministries of higher education and scientific research worldwide, calling on national governments to take direct responsibility for monitoring and sanctioning the use of fake metrics within their own jurisdictions.
“Given the unprecedented, global scale of this academic fraud, it is time for ministries to ensure that institutional ‘prestige’ is not built on digital deception and to hold local universities accountable for upholding academic integrity,” Moskovkin stressed.
A threat to global HE sector
Global higher education expert and director of strategic insights at RMIT University in Australia, Angel Calderon, told University World News: “The continued proliferation of fake global university rankings, alongside the growing visibility of fraudulent or unsubstantiated expertise, is a matter of significant concern for the global higher education sector.
“While strategic geo-targeting is increasingly evident, particularly in emerging economies that are strengthening their higher education systems, it is important to emphasise the need to empower university leaders and the broader academic community to uphold academic integrity and adhere to the ethical principles of responsible scholarly publishing and information dissemination,” added Calderon, who is the author of “Sustainability Rankings: What they are about and how to make them meaningful”.
Proliferation of fake rankings expected
Calderon warned that the proliferation of fake global rankings and fraudulent expertise is unlikely to disappear anytime soon in an era of rapid technological transformation.
“I anticipate that academics and institutions will increasingly become targets of unscrupulous entities seeking commercial gain, as competition for resources intensifies and the pressure to demonstrate institutional relevance grows.
“This underscores the need for continued vigilance against such practices and for sustained efforts to raise awareness among university leaders, policymakers, academics, the media, and society more broadly.”
He said it is imperative to foster greater collaboration between academics in established higher education systems and their counterparts in emerging and developing systems, enabling them to learn from one another while strengthening quality assurance, upholding academic integrity, and promoting responsible academic practice.
Governments should be ‘more active’
“At the same time, national governments should be encouraged to play a more active role in establishing and strengthening frameworks for academic integrity, as well as robust systems for the verification and dissemination of reliable information.”
He said that while many critics contend that global rankings should be discontinued, they are unlikely to disappear anytime soon. Similarly, the pressure on academics to publish is unlikely to diminish in the foreseeable future.
“Ideally, we should reframe the ways in which academic staff are recognised and rewarded by reducing the sector’s reliance on quantitative performance indicators, including bibliometric measures.
“These challenges are complex and unlikely to be resolved easily,” he said.
“Nevertheless, it is important to continue discussions on reforming academic promotion and reward systems to ensure that they more fully recognise the breadth, quality, and impact of academic contributions.”
University World News reached out to the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, QS World University Rankings, ShanghaiRanking’s Academic Ranking of World Universities and THE World University Rankings for reaction to the study but received no responses.
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