Author: gqSbgCfmna

Monthongwittaya School’s 7-a-side football team from Bang Nam Priao district of Chachoensao is now among Thailand’s most inspiring underdog stories, capturing national attention with their remarkable run in the 2025 7HD Football Champion Cup.

The small secondary school’s team, nicknamed the “Celtic of Bang Nam Priao” owing to its green jersey, has stunned Thai football fans with its fairy-tale run to the national final. The team fits its underdog image — no reputation, no ranking. Only a few expected the team to achieve much in a national tournament. Yet they defied the odds spectacularly.

Starting in the qualifying round of 503 teams on Oct 6, the team stunned the nation by defeating powerhouse teams such as Nakhon Ratchasima Municipality Sports School, Assumption Thonburi, Debsirin School, and Assumption College Sriracha.

Even though the team lost 2–1 to Chainat Provincial Administrative Organisation School in the final, they won the hearts of fans, businessmen, politicians, and influencers who rallied behind them. Their final match on Nov 8 at Supachalasai National Stadium drew around 30,000 fans while Channel 7HD reported a peak of 4.2 million concurrent viewers during the live broadcast.

Why did this grassroots football story become so popular? Because Monthongwittaya’s journey was not paved with rose petals, they travelled to matches in an old truck nicknamed Rot Khon Fun (the Dream Transport). This symbolised their perseverance, humble beginnings and their unexpected fighting spirit.

Of course, I’m one of the legion of fans and followed the team’s progress on social media. I watched interview clips of Sakon Kliengprasert, the team’s renowned youth football coach, who has developed some players for the Thai national team.

Now, in retirement, Coach Sakon has guided Monthongwittaya School to its first-ever appearance in the 7HD Football Champion Cup final. He is widely known as a “coachbuilder”. More than coaching on how to play and win, he instils discipline and moral values in his players.

Through social media, I have been able to follow these young footballers closely. From their interviews, it’s clear that they are determined and full of dreams — to become professional footballers and better people.

Some players in the team openly admit that they come from poor families; football for them is more than a hobby, but is seen as a passport to a better life. Such hope drives them to be disciplined, hard-working and clinical when they play. Like world-class athletes, they dream, even in their waking hours, of becoming champions.

I believe that their victories across so many games, defeating major schools along the way, were not the result of coincidence or luck. Rather, it was the outcome of passion, hard work, and grit under the guidance of Coach Sakon that brought them to this point.

What I found even more inspiring was how the team’s journey dominated national attention. Politicians, regardless of their political hues, influencers, and fans alike, were drawn to their performance, proving that football can unite, drive community, and create pride in the country.

Who stepped in to help them along their journey? Thai Smile Bus donated a 4.5-million-baht electric bus to replace their old truck, ensuring the team could travel safely and sustainably to future matches.

Pimradaporn Benjawattanapat, aka Pimrypie, the famous YouTuber and online seller, posted on her Facebook page after the final match on Nov 8 that Coach Sakon will receive 10,000 baht per month for life as a gesture of support.

Additionally, Deputy Prime Minister and Agriculture and Cooperative Minister Capt Thamanat Prompow donated 150,000 baht from his foundation to Monthongwittaya. He also ordered improvements to the school to encourage and support young athletes. It could not help but be noticed that Capt Thamanat’s actions have been perceived as a political move ahead of next year’s general election.

But Monthongwittaya’s rise offered a rare chance to bridge politics, community, culture, and sport in a single narrative. By helping the team, these figures are tapping into a national mood of hope, solidarity, and admiration for the underdog.

Monthongwittaya have become more than a football team. They have become a stage for Thailand’s leaders and opinion-makers to demonstrate empathy, relevance, and connection to the people. Their story reminds us that football is not just a game — it is a mirror reflecting society’s struggles and aspirations.

The consequences of climate tipping points are almost too big to imagine. The thought that, over the course of a few decades, the Amazon rainforest could become a savannah, or coral reefs could become extinct, seems like science fiction. Given how many people have been lulled into a false sense of control over the environment, it is perhaps even harder to grasp that incremental changes in temperature and rainfall irreversibly reorganise planetary-scale systems.

But data from ever-more advanced Earth system models indicate that these tipping points are fast approaching or may, in the case of coral reefs and the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, already be in the rear-view mirror. And it is not at all clear that climate interventions could make the problem go away.

Institutions at all levels are not prepared to manage such possibilities. The current processes for synthesising climate science into policy recommendations are stronger for global-scale changes than they are for the local insights that a city planner in Jakarta, a finance minister in Brazil, or a farmer in the Sahel needs. That is because these processes are better equipped to highlight the areas of agreement than they are to map the terrain of uncertainty.

Most infrastructure plans, policy frameworks, financial markets, and risk-management strategies do not recognise the possibility of crossing climate tipping points, which are foreseeable but not predictable. This makes it difficult to weigh investments in immediate needs against the future effects of such spending.

The lack of capacity to respond to climate tipping points must be addressed now. Reducing the risk of crossing them poses a global collective-action problem, especially because they cover different domains. For example, many factors contribute to coral reef collapse, including global warming, ocean acidification, ecosystem loss, pollution runoff, and overfishing. And yet climate science, biodiversity research, pollution monitoring, and resource management are consigned to separate silos, leaving nobody responsible for monitoring and mitigating tipping dynamics.

Building the institutional architecture for tipping-point governance comes down to three essential tasks. The first is continuous tracking of tipping dynamics — including human and social dimensions — and the development of a shared, actionable understanding of them. The second is increased recognition of the risks, which means ensuring that they are central considerations in government and business decision-making. Lastly, it is important to establish the capacity for timely, coordinated response across policy domains, sectors, and scales.

In a concept note for the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, we show how these capacities can be developed through regional Tipping Element Monitoring and Response Facilities (TEMRFs) which would share information and coordinate action as needed. Each TEMRF would focus on a specific tipping element and be regionally grounded — but globally networked. These facilities could weave together existing regional frameworks for cooperation, including networks of scientists, policymakers, city governments, Indigenous peoples, and diplomats.

TEMRFs can learn from other initiatives that have developed new ways of synthesising climate science for decision-makers, such as the World Climate Research Programme’s My Climate Risk Lighthouse Activity, the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme, the Science Panels for the Amazon, the Congo Basin, and Borneo, and the Amazon Regional Observatory. These programmes have demonstrated how to represent systemic risks in a tangible way that is tailored to different stakeholders. TEMRFs should follow their example by aggregating information from a wide range of sources — such as quantitative models, satellite data, and indigenous knowledge — and creating a comprehensive picture for various audiences.

Political and business leaders, with their focus on election cycles and quarterly earnings, need contextual frameworks that recognise and incorporate the risks of crossing climate tipping points. To that end, TEMRFs will have to consider decades-long time horizons and ensure that tipping elements are a part of policy frameworks for infrastructure planning, financial regulation, and development policy. Tough trade-offs — between short-term growth and long-term resilience, and between preserving the status quo and adapting to new realities — will be unavoidable.

Lastly, TEMRFs must organise responses at a scale and pace that matches the urgency of the situation. The Amazon rainforest spans nine countries, and ocean currents connect continents; both have tipping dynamics with local to global impacts unfolding over complicated time scales. This requires institutions capable of coordinating action across jurisdictions, bridging the public and private sectors, and responding flexibly to changing conditions.

Regional bodies are well positioned to achieve these objectives because they are close enough to see the effects of crossing tipping points, and large enough to devise and implement coordinated cross-border measures. Organisations like the Nordic Council of Ministers or the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organisation could play important roles in developing this architecture, drawing on their experience of navigating evolving concerns with incomplete mandates. Regional development banks and alliances around shared interests such as the International Coral Reef Initiative can also be good starting points.

There is a deeper imperative for strengthening regional capacities. Global efforts often falter under the weight of profound inequities and lingering mistrust — both between and within countries — about whose interests are really being served. In this context, Earth system tipping points can easily be framed and perceived as yet another agenda pushed from the Global North to discipline development elsewhere. TEMRFs chart a different course: creating space for regions to claim their voice, cultivate their own scientific capabilities and grounded insights, and work with stakeholders across scales to shape development pathways rooted in their own geographies and the Earth systems that sustain them. TEMRFs offer a way to connect global ambition with regional realities — on terms defined by those who live them. ©2025 Project Syndicate

The deaths of at least two Thais in Cambodia’s Poipet in the past week attest to the fact that the transnational call centre networks remain active and strong, as the government in Phnom Penh shamefully fails to keep its commitment to uprooting this heinous criminality.

The two, Suda Chonlaket and Sarawut (surname not released), were said to be working for one of these networks. The bruises on their bodies suggest they were tortured for failing to meet network revenue targets.

A rescue organisation believes that five people might have been murdered by the network in recent weeks. At print time, Suda’s husband, also a network employee, remains unaccounted for.

Meanwhile, another 14 Thai citizens who claimed they were lured into working for scam syndicates in Cambodia were rescued and repatriated earlier this week by a joint rescue team.

However, like the cases of Suda and Sarawut, there are no reports of crime bosses, said to be members of a Chinese mafia, being arrested in the operation.

It’s an open secret that Cambodian authorities, from top to bottom, have allegedly been paid under the table by the crime bosses.

Allegedly, the ill-gotten gains systematically go to those in government, as the grey business has expanded extensively, so much so that Cambodia has earned the reputation of being one of the largest online scam hubs in the world.

Some high-profile bosses, like Yim Leak — a wealthy businessman blacklisted by the US for his grey businesses — have close connections with the influential Hun family in Cambodia. There are also allegations that Yim Leak, as well as his fellow tycoons, also had strong ties to politicians and businesspeople in Thailand.

More than just a few young Thais working for these networks have died over the past years. There have been no investigations, as Cambodian authorities have just claimed the workers plunged to their death or had heart failure, a very unusual cause of death for people of working age. Yet, it’s reported that Thai authorities have received hardly any cooperation from their Cambodian counterparts — even when relations were warm and cordial — in cracking down or conducting probes into those unusual deaths.

Unlike the case of the South Korean student who was abducted and killed by gangsters in Cambodia, which triggered global attention last month, those unusual deaths of the Thai citizens largely faded from public attention. But such irregularities must not be allowed to go on.

Phnom Penh must be reminded of its obligations to crack down on transboundary scam networks. In fact, it’s one of the four prerequisites it agreed to before entering into the peace deal with Thailand last month.

Thailand must reinforce its efforts to combat transboundary crime and keep the global community engaged, taking Cambodia to task for failing to dismantle criminal networks as promised.

At the same time, Thai authorities must clean up Thailand’s own backyard by accelerating operations against scam networks so that no criminal bosses escape the law.