By Dr. Azizi Abu Bakar and Mohd Fadhli Rahmat Fakri
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.
The authors are Research Officers at the Sustainable Development Centre (UMSDC), Universiti Malaya, and Data Stewards for Universiti Malaya Open Science (UMOS).
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