Meet the Thai Youth Bridging the Gap Between Classrooms and Reefs

 

Youth-led Care for Coral brings marine conservation into Bangkok classrooms, empowering children facing extreme weather and climate inequality.

 

A child sitting in an overheated classroom in Bangkok may seem worlds away from a bleaching coral reef beneath Thailand’s coastal waters. In reality, their futures are more closely connected than we might imagine.

 

Education is fundamental to addressing human-caused climate change, and in Bangkok, extreme heat can disrupt the education of the city’s most vulnerable citizens: its children. Extreme weather events that cause flooding can disrupt the journey to school, while periods of hazardous PM2.5 pollution threaten children’s health and force everyday activities indoors.

 

 

Across Thailand, the scale of these challenges is clear. A 2025 UNICEF-supported survey of 329 climate-vulnerable public schools found that every school surveyed had experienced extreme weather during the previous three years. Three-quarters reported disruptions to necessities, including transportation, drinking water, sanitation or food, while 55 percent reported health problems among students.
 

 

 

However, environmental disruption does not affect every child equally.

 

A typical day for a student from a wealthy Bangkok family might start in an air-conditioned home, followed by private transportation and a day learning in a well-resourced school with cooling and air filtration. 

 

Other children have fewer protections. Climate change therefore magnifies existing educational inequalities, and the ability to escape extreme heat, polluted air and flooding increasingly depends upon the resources available to a child’s family and school.
 

 

Hundreds of kilometres from Bangkok, Thailand’s coral reefs tell another part of the same story. Rising ocean temperatures are causing coral bleaching around the world. Yet reefs are far more than beautiful underwater ecosystems.

 

 

Globally, an estimated one billion people benefit directly or indirectly from the services coral reefs provide. Healthy reefs support fisheries and livelihoods while absorbing as much as 97 percent of incoming wave energy, helping protect coastal communities from waves, storms and erosion.
 

 

 

This is where organisations such as Care for Coral are connecting conservation with education. The Thai youth-led organisation works with schools nationwide to teach young people about coral restoration and has brought that education directly into Bangkok classrooms, creating a crucial connection between tomorrow’s generation and an underwater world that can seem distant to most of us.

 

 

Restoring a coral reef will not cool a Bangkok classroom or clear its polluted air. The connection is larger: healthy ecosystems make human societies more resilient.

 

Protecting reefs means protecting biodiversity, food sources, livelihoods and natural coastal defences upon which communities depend.

 

 

For young people, perhaps that is climate education’s most important lesson. Environmental problems do not respect the boundaries between ocean and city, or nature and humanity.

 

A child in a Bangkok classroom and a coral reef off Thailand’s coast may occupy very different worlds. Their futures, however, are being shaped by the same one. 

 

 

 

 

BY CARE FOR CORAL 

 

 

This report was produced as part of the Media Fellowship under the Cities on Fire initiative in Bangkok