Original Thai Version Published on 19 December 2025
Climate change was a major driver of the Hat Yai floods in November 2025, a severe disaster that affected people across every group and occupation — shop owners and businesses that suffered losses, workers at risk of losing their jobs, farmers whose land was flooded, fishers dependent on healthy marine ecosystems, and vulnerable groups such as those with health issues, children, and the elderly, who often face challenges many times greater than the general public and need care, recovery, and remedy under a comprehensive concept of “climate justice” — one that leaves no one excluded from the state’s or other stakeholders’ adaptation systems and mechanisms.
Although this concept has already been discussed to some extent in Thai society, concrete momentum for change has yet to emerge. A closer look reveals that Thai Climate Justice for All (TCJA), a project under the Local Development Institute (LDI), has been working to drive this issue forward and turn it into reality. This edition of SDG in Action invited Kritsada Boonchai, founder of TCJA and Secretary-General of LDI, to share the organization’s origins, vision, obstacles, and recommendations for work that helps ensure all groups of people are included in preparing for and adapting to climate change.
01 — United We Stand, Divided We Fall
Before TCJA existed, there was no single body connecting the various strands of climate justice work. Even though a fair number of civil society organizations already worked on climate change, each tended to focus on a specific sub-issue with its own distinct target group — for example, groups working on community forests, groups pushing for a just energy transition, and groups monitoring industrial pollution.
Kritsada opened the conversation by looking back to the days before TCJA took shape, tracing how it grew from small beginnings into a coalition built to drive systemic, in-depth change. He recalled that in the past there had been a climate justice group called the “Fair Cool Earth Working Group,” which dissolved not long after it began. That gap was what prompted him to launch TCJA, using the Local Development Institute — where he already worked — as the lead organization to lay the groundwork, since it had both the knowledge and the networks, particularly around community resource management, community forests, and food security. This base became the central link connecting various issue-based groups around a shared goal: reducing risk, building resilience to climate change, and pushing for fair structural change together. These groups are highly diverse — including the Sustainable Agriculture Foundation, the Community Forestry Training Center, the Ecological Alert and Recovery Foundation, academics working on just and sustainable energy, and the Foundation for Sustainable Development, which works with small-scale fishing communities, among others.
Despite this diversity, all these groups share a commitment to protecting community rights and prioritizing climate justice. These two principles form TCJA’s foundation — protecting community rights while pushing government and the private sector to take responsibility for their impacts on ecosystems, the environment, and anything else contributing to climate change.
The coming-together of Thai NGOs that gave rise to TCJA is not simply a reflection of the NGO network’s progress — it marks a turning point toward helping every group of people, in every area, understand and access climate adaptation, with a shared goal of building greater climate justice.
02 — The Real Picture of Injustice
Once the vision was clear and the network established, the next step was to survey and understand how local communities across Thailand actually experience climate injustice. A particularly stark example is that of ethnic groups practicing rotational farming, such as the Karen. Kritsada calls them “victims accused of being perpetrators,” explaining that this group is treated as a scapegoat by both the state and society. They are blamed for burning forests, causing wildfires and PM2.5 pollution, and contributing to global warming — when in reality they play a major role in protecting what remains of Thailand’s forests. Rotational farming releases relatively little carbon, and many of its practices actually help absorb carbon. Yet when climate-driven disasters such as floods and landslides occur, these communities are hit directly and severely. He cites the example of the Karen community of Hin Lat Nai in Chiang Rai province, which suffered a landslide despite having helped protect more than ten thousand rai of forest.
Kritsada points out that this group needs greater capacity to adapt to increasingly severe global warming. A pressing question is how to extinguish or control wildfires: traditional community knowledge already handles this well, but as global warming intensifies, TCJA and other stakeholders need to help communities build even greater capacity, while also pushing for policies that protect local community rights.
Moving from highland areas to urban ones, Kritsada points to the “urban poor” as another vulnerable group affected by climate change. In Bangkok — a highly urbanized area with considerable economic inequality — living in the capital, where infrastructure is better than in the provinces, doesn’t guarantee safety from climate impacts. This is especially true for poor people who lack the means to mitigate or escape risk, such as slum residents, motorcycle taxi drivers, and infants in daycare centers, who have almost no access to resources that could protect them from rising heat or increasingly severe flooding.
03 — Producing Knowledge Grounded in Social Science
The problems facing communities — rural, highland, or urban — require urgent action to keep pace with intensifying climate change. TCJA has helped communities build comprehensive climate resilience through numerous activities and projects, one flagship initiative being “building knowledge about climate justice among Thai people.”
TCJA pioneers the production of knowledge on this issue from a new angle grounded in social science, creating content that helps people understand how climate justice connects to society, ways of life, and the culture of different communities through a socio-ecological lens — while also examining political ecology through a political-science perspective that reveals which mechanisms or systems are flawed and generate injustice in adaptation and resource management. Published articles have introduced concepts such as green colonialism, helping Thai people better understand the connection between climate change and their own lives.
Another successful TCJA initiative is the People’s COP forum, a public platform held alongside the global COP conference, which opens space for the public to follow climate issues with understanding, exchange views, and carry useful recommendations forward into further learning.
The work published on TCJA’s website and Facebook page is concrete evidence of the organization’s serious effort to advance climate justice in Thai society — particularly its diverse research output, such as action research on building the capacity of the Karen for sustainable food systems amid climate change, and recommendations on climate justice for the draft Climate Change Act, both of great value for further learning, practical application, and policy design.
04 — Building Youth Leaders to Carry Justice Forward Sustainably
Beyond promoting knowledge and approaches for the general public, TCJA places special emphasis on youth, since they are the ones who will live with this world the longest and are a vital force for carrying the mission of climate justice forward.
Kritsada notes, however, that young people in Thailand today see the problem of climate change but feel hopeless, believing it is too big — a global problem they can do nothing about. At the same time, they’ve been taught that there are only a few ways to help save the planet, such as using fewer plastic bags, saving electricity, and managing waste — framed narrowly around individual behavior change — without being invited to understand the larger structural problem: that 70% of greenhouse gas emissions actually come from the energy industry, not ordinary people. Understanding this clarifies the real, connected inequality between causes and impacts, and allows young people to ask sharper, more targeted questions.
Believing strongly in the power of the younger generation, TCJA focuses on opening safe, free spaces, encouraging group formation, and building diverse networks to equip young people with the knowledge and readiness to become change leaders who can strengthen their own communities’ capacity to defend their rights and adapt to climate change. One key mechanism, Kritsada explains, is a volunteer youth group called Youth Climate Justice Advocates (YCJA), initiated and led by Natthida Rattanasawat, Head of Youth Communication and Learning at TCJA — now in its second cohort. These youth volunteers join TCJA’s work and learning process while producing their own communications and social-campaign output, with TCJA providing support through workshops and training to build their knowledge and skills.
Natthida has also taken the lead in developing a climate justice curriculum for schools. While schools already offer some environmental curricula, Kritsada notes there was previously nothing specifically on global warming or climate change — so TCJA began developing one, piloting a partnership with the Demonstration School of Thammasat University at the Mattayom 1 (grade 7) level. It is now being used in actual classroom teaching and continues to be refined, with plans to expand to other schools if the pilot succeeds.
These efforts have already borne concrete fruit: most of TCJA’s current activities now originate from the ideas and initiative of this youth group, reflecting their potential and readiness to become leaders in building climate justice for their own communities.
05 — “Easy to Digest” and “Participatory”: TCJA’s Keys to Success
TCJA’s dedication to producing knowledge and empowering civil society and youth has made it a recognized frontrunner in driving climate justice in Thailand. Asked what has driven TCJA’s continued success, Kritsada points to at least two key factors: making climate change “easy to digest,” and opening space for communities to exchange ideas and participate in co-creating knowledge.
TCJA draws on anthropological approaches and avoids academic jargon when communicating with villagers. When entering different communities, the team tries to learn from villagers how they are affected by soil, sky, and weather conditions — floods, droughts, heat, disasters, and other phenomena — because villagers who live close to nature, such as communities along the Mekong River, forest communities, or farming communities, often hold deep wisdom for explaining what’s happening, rooted in their own lived experience and understanding, distinct from that of academics. This is essentially an anthropologist’s tool: don’t leap in with your own framework and impose it on people — instead, start by learning their conditions, worldview, and relationship with nature and climate, understanding how they live and make sense of their world, before inviting discussion or analysis of the changes occurring in their own local context.
Still, despite TCJA’s progress, the work hasn’t been without challenges. Because this is a pioneering perspective still unfamiliar to most Thais, helping people understand how “climate” and “justice” connect isn’t easy. TCJA tries to address this by presenting concrete, visible examples — such as linking wildfires and PM2.5 pollution to climate change, or showing, in the case of agriculture, how ecological farming can help reduce global warming — so people can see how they themselves might help reduce climate impacts.
Another challenge is widespread public misunderstanding, particularly around carbon credits. The private sector often presents them as a win-win-win: companies gain credits, villagers earn money, and the environment improves. But TCJA views this as a form of greenwashing — the carbon credits companies purchase don’t come close to offsetting the carbon they emit, yet they still receive a continued “license to pollute.” Meanwhile, the money villagers receive comes at the cost of losing rights over managing their own community forests, or having their rights diminished as they are forced to share decision-making authority with outside private entities.
This is a difficult narrative to challenge or shift, Kritsada stresses, because many people — economists, government officials, even many civil society organizations — still see carbon credits as an opportunity for communities. TCJA understands the underlying necessity driving that view, but works to show that the process doesn’t end with receiving money; it brings a tangle of further problems.
06 — Advice for Fellow Travelers on This Path
Before closing, Kritsada offered words of encouragement to everyone working on climate adaptation, along with three lessons learned from TCJA’s work.
First: understand society and people. He hopes those working in this field start by understanding the people in society, especially when designing policy — ensuring everyone can participate, and that people are helped to understand how climate change relates to and affects their lives across different dimensions.
Second: view climate justice through multiple lenses — intergenerational fairness, fairness between polluters and the public, and fairness for marginalized individuals whose rights are violated. Kritsada notes that environmentalists and rights advocates have often worked separately, without understanding each other, speaking almost different languages — environmentalists focusing on biodiversity, conservation, and ecosystems, while rights advocates focus on policy rights, participation rights, human rights, or group rights, as if operating in separate worlds. Today, however, everything is so interconnected that it’s nearly impossible to separate them — environmental issues, community rights, and the rights of nature overlap significantly, so understanding these cross-cutting issues is essential.
Finally: build strong collaborative networks. Diverse, wide-ranging collaboration — involving economists, scientists, sociologists, artists, communicators, and writers — helps push the issue further, presenting climate justice through varied formats that reach different audiences more effectively.
This conversation with Kritsada is not just a picture of what TCJA is doing to help Thai society build comprehensive climate resilience — it reaches further, reflecting both the real obstacles and the aspirations behind this work. The core lesson Kritsada underscored throughout is to “look closely and empathetically at how climate change affects the lives of every group,” and to “build a strong network to work together for the widest possible impact, because climate change has so many dimensions.” These two threads run through the heart of climate justice work — inseparable from any strategy or practice in this field.
