Arya News - The youth-led organisation, Care for Coral, aims to raise awareness on coral reef bleaching in coastal areas, and help students understand how urban and marine environmental problems are interconnected through climate change.
BANGKOK – 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.