Embed water literacy early to build climate resilience

Submitted through the COP31 Sustainable Transformation Awards · SKD Türkiye (WBCSD Global Network Partner)

The company is a bank operating across Türkiye in the financial services sector, with more than 10,000 employees and a nationwide branch network.

Türkiye holds around 1,300 m3 of usable water per person per year, which places it among water-stressed countries, and that figure is at risk of falling to about 1,100 m3 by 2050. Scarcity on this scale is not resolved by supply infrastructure alone, because household and community consumption habits determine how far a constrained supply can be stretched.

In banking, sustainability is usually addressed through risk management, disclosure and product design. The company's assessment was that those instruments do not reach the behavioural side of water stress, and that a bank with national reach is able to contribute capacity building alongside capital.

The initiative was therefore designed around children rather than customers. Water literacy formed in childhood shapes lifetime consumption habits and travels back into the household through the child, so early education was treated as a long-term demand-side measure rather than a communications activity.

The programme was delivered for the first time in 2024 and sits inside the company's wider sustainability approach, which includes a 2050 net zero commitment, CDP Climate Change and CDP Water Security disclosure, reporting aligned with the Turkish Sustainability Reporting Standards and with ISSB IFRS S1 and S2, and independent third-party assurance (1).

Location of the initiative: 81 provinces across Türkiye

The programme is a three-party delivery model. The company provides funding, corporate sponsorship and employee volunteers; a United Nations development organisation contributes the methodological framework on water and sustainability; and a national civil society organisation runs project coordination, field delivery, volunteer management and roll-out. Curriculum design and delivery decisions are taken jointly rather than by the funder alone.

The content is a standardised water literacy curriculum for children aged 7 to 14, built as gamified, hands-on learning rather than classroom lecturing. Sessions cover the water cycle, water saving in daily use and rainwater harvesting, and each concept is made concrete through a practical workshop task.

Delivery is deliberately spread across settings so that access does not depend on being in a well-served urban school. The sessions are conducted in various settings where children of different age groups come together: in the child care homes known as Sevgi Evleri (organised in cooperation with public institutions and local partners), through mobile libraries (especially in rural areas) and at public community events.

Volunteer trainers rather than paid educators carry the sessions. Trainers, including employees of the company, complete a structured four-day training programme, are selected with gender balance and regional distribution in mind, and are then supported through a national sustainability network and certification opportunities.

A public digital platform, suilehayata.com, carries the same content online. It gives continuous access to children and families who cannot attend a session, extends the reach of the face-to-face work, and provides usage analytics that feed the monitoring system.

Field environment workshops and a water awareness festival complete the model, giving children and families experience-based learning on water saving, the water cycle and biodiversity alongside local administrations.

The initiative is positioned as one of the environmental components of the company's wider children's engagement platform, which has reached more than 750,000 children since 2015, so it draws on an established delivery capability rather than starting from nothing.

Figure 1: A field workshop in which children build models from reused plastic bottles while learning how water is used and saved at home.

Figure 2: The four-day trainer training that prepares volunteers to deliver the workshops, run with the United Nations Development Programme in Türkiye and Habitat Association.

Sustainability Impact

Climate

The programme is a capacity-building measure rather than an emissions-reduction measure, and it does not target the company's own Scope 1 or Scope 2 emissions.

Its climate relevance is adaptive. With usable water at around 1,300 m³ per person per year and a risk of decline to about 1,100 m³ by 2050, demand-side behaviour is one of the few levers available on that timescale. Building water literacy in children aged 7 to 14 is intended to lower future household consumption and raise community resilience to drought, which is the enabling effect the initiative is designed to produce.

The company's own climate performance is managed separately through its 2050 net zero commitment and through CDP Climate Change and CDP Water Security disclosure; this initiative is a social component of that strategy rather than a source of reported reductions.

Nature

The environmental content is directed at freshwater resources rather than at a corporate footprint. Children work through the water cycle, everyday water saving and rainwater harvesting as practical tasks, so the intended outcome is reduced pressure on a stressed national resource.

Field environment workshops run with local administrations extend the same content to biodiversity, connecting water use with the condition of local ecosystems and giving children and accompanying families experience-based rather than theoretical exposure.

Because delivery reaches families through the child, the intended effect moves from individual awareness towards household and community water-use behaviour.

Social

To date the programme has run in 81 provinces and reached 6,793 children face to face, with a further 1,725 children reached digitally through the suilehayata.com platform, taking total reach above 8,000.

Trainer capacity was built alongside reach. Trainer training sessions, including volunteers from the company, took the volunteer trainer network to 69 people in the first period. Six field environment workshops were delivered, and a water awareness festival was held with 200 children taking part.

In the second delivery period a trainer training programme held on 11 to 14 June 2026 brought 26 new volunteer trainers into the initiative, taking the network to 120 people. The targets set for this period are delivery in 81 provinces, a further 5,000 children reached, 15 field environment workshops and a further water awareness festival; these are stated targets and not yet results.

Equal opportunity in access is a fundamental component of the delivery model. Children reached through the programme, whether in settings that bring together children of various age groups, in Sevgi Evleri established in collaboration with public institutions and local partners, or through mobile libraries in rural areas, receive the same curriculum and trainers of the same standard as children attending schools in urban centres, and gender balance and regional distribution are explicit criteria when volunteer trainers are selected.

Participation and gender distribution among both participants and volunteers are tracked as standing indicators, alongside the number of children reached face to face, digital platform users and reach, the number of provinces and delivery points, trainer numbers, and workshop and festival attendance.

Business Impact

Benefits

The programme gives the company a community capacity-building role that its financial products cannot deliver, which broadens its sustainability position from risk management and disclosure into demonstrable social contribution.

Employee volunteering is the practical benefit inside the organisation. Staff who complete the four-day trainer training gain facilitation experience and certification, and the volunteer route gives the sustainability strategy a channel through which employees participate directly rather than receiving it as policy.

Reach and participation data feed the integrated annual report and the Turkish Sustainability Reporting Standards aligned disclosures, so the initiative produces reportable, externally assured content rather than only communications material.

The model itself is a reusable asset. Because the curriculum, the trainer training and the digital platform are standardised, the same structure can be redirected to energy efficiency, climate change or biodiversity without rebuilding the delivery chain.

Costs

The programme is funded from the company's own corporate resources rather than from external donations, which removes fundraising dependency but places the full cost on the sponsor's budget for as long as the initiative runs.

The cost base is curriculum development, portable workshop kits, the structured four-day trainer training, field workshop and festival delivery, volunteer management, and the development and maintenance of the suilehayata.com platform. Employee volunteer time is a real cost carried by the business even though it does not appear as programme expenditure.

Costs scale with geography. Moving from 20 provinces to a target of 81 multiplies travel, kit logistics and trainer support, so the second period requires a proportionally larger commitment than the first.

Volunteer turnover is a recurring cost driver, because every departure requires a replacement to be recruited and put through the full training cycle before delivery capacity is restored.

Costs are contained by using volunteer trainers rather than paid educators, by standardising the curriculum and the kits so that no local redesign is needed, by delivering through existing public institutions and civil society organisations rather than dedicated venues, and by using the digital platform to serve children the field programme cannot reach.

Impact Beyond Sustainability And Business

Co-benefits

Reaching children in care homes and in rural areas through mobile libraries extends water education to groups that structured environmental programmes usually miss, which makes the initiative an access-equity measure as well as an environmental one.

Selecting volunteer trainers with gender balance and regional distribution in mind builds a distributed national capability rather than a capital-city one, and the certification and network membership offered to volunteers has value to them beyond the programme.

Because children carry the content home, families and local communities are reached without being addressed directly, and the field environment workshops give parents the same experience-based exposure as the children.

Potential side-effects

Regional differences in access and volunteer turnover are treated as systemic risks of the model. They are managed through balanced trainer selection, continuous training and certification, and the digital platform as a fallback channel, but neither risk is eliminated.

Scaling from 20 provinces towards 81 puts quality at risk if standardisation slips, since the model depends on every trainer delivering the same curriculum to the same standard regardless of location.

The monitoring framework measures reach, participation and geographic spread rather than consumption change. Reported figures therefore evidence delivery rather than behavioural outcome, and a company adopting this model should expect to add an outcome measurement layer if it wants to claim water savings.

Typical Business Profile

The "To Life with Water" Project funded by QNB Türkiye and implemented by UNDP Türkiye in partnership with Habitat Association.

The model suits banks, insurers and other consumer-facing companies that have a national branch or agency footprint, an existing employee volunteering base and a sustainability strategy that already extends beyond regulatory disclosure.

It is most relevant where the environmental issue has a strong behavioural component, such as water use, waste or household energy, because the return comes from changed habits rather than from installed technology.

Delivery engages sustainability, corporate communications, human resources and employee volunteering, and reporting and internal control functions, working with an implementing civil society partner that supplies field capability the company does not hold in-house.

Approach

1. Anchor the theme in a measurable national resource risk: Establish the baseline before designing content, in this case usable water of around 1,300 m³ per person per year with a projected decline to about 1,100 m³ by 2050, so that the initiative addresses a defined exposure rather than a general awareness goal.

2. Assemble a three-party delivery partnership: Combine corporate funding and volunteers, the methodological framework of an international development organisation, and the field delivery, volunteer management and coordination capability of a civil society organisation, and make curriculum decisions jointly.

3. Standardise a curriculum for a defined age band: Build gamified, hands-on content for children aged 7 to 14 covering the water cycle, water saving and rainwater harvesting, and fix the content so that quality does not vary between regions.

4. Package the delivery kit for portability: Produce portable workshop sets so the same session can be run in a school, a care home, a mobile library or a public event without local adaptation or a fixed venue.

5. Train volunteer trainers through a structured four-day programme: Recruit trainers including employees, apply gender balance and regional distribution as selection criteria, and support them afterwards with certification and membership of a national sustainability network.

6. Diversify the delivery points deliberately: Agree access with public institutions and local administrations so that sessions run in schools, in children's care homes, in rural areas through mobile libraries and at public events, and so that children outside well-served urban schools receive the same programme.

7. Add a permanent digital channel: Publish the curriculum on an open platform so that reach continues between field campaigns, children who cannot attend are covered, and platform analytics become part of the evidence base.

8. Run a single monitoring system and close the loop: Collect reach, participation, geographic spread, trainer numbers and gender distribution through the volunteer management system, trainer field reports and digital analytics, review the results jointly with the partners, and use them to revise the curriculum, the delivery plan and the expansion targets before the next period.

Stakeholders Involved

• Project leads: Senior management owns the initiative: the chief executive supports it through field visits, meetings with participating children and public communication, which keeps it positioned as an application of the sustainability strategy rather than a philanthropic side activity. Governance sits with the Sustainability Committee, chaired by the executive responsible for sustainability, which reviews strategic objectives, outputs and performance indicators on a regular cycle. The company's 2050 net zero commitment and sustainability strategy provide the guiding framework, and results are released through the integrated annual report and sustainability reporting.

• Company functions: The sustainability function manages the partnership, the indicator set and the reporting interface. Corporate communications handles public engagement and the digital platform, human resources and the employee volunteering structure supply and support volunteer trainers, and reporting and internal control teams integrate the results into Turkish Sustainability Reporting Standards aligned disclosure and internal control processes.

• Main providers: A United Nations development organisation contributes the methodological framework drawn from the global sustainability and water agenda. A national civil society organisation delivers project coordination, field implementation, volunteer management and roll-out, and operates the volunteer management system through which monitoring data is collected. The two partners and the company take curriculum and implementation decisions jointly.

• Other: Public institutions and local administrations provide access to schools, children's care homes and mobile libraries and co-host the field environment workshops. Teachers, care home managers, families and local communities participate in delivery and provide feedback. Volunteer trainers, including employees and external volunteers, carry the sessions. Independent assurance providers verify the sustainability data before publication.

Key Parameters To Consider

The model is modular and geography-independent. Its four components are a standardised curriculum, portable workshop kits, a structured four-day trainer training programme and the digital platform, and these together allow delivery at the same quality standard in different regions.

Two delivery periods have run so far. The first, from 2024, covered 20 provinces; the second began with trainer training on 11 to 14 June 2026 and targets 81 provinces.

The model rests on three core elements: corporate funding that removes dependence on external donations, a partnership that combines international methodological knowledge with national field experience, and a digital platform that maintains access between field campaigns.

Continuity depends on the volunteer trainer network, so annual trainer training is a structural requirement rather than an optional extra, and the approach is transferable to other sustainability themes such as energy efficiency, climate change or biodiversity.

Implementation And Operations Tips

Measure reach and participation from the first session. Delivery data collected through a volunteer management system, trainer field reports and platform analytics is what allows the curriculum and the roll-out plan to be revised on evidence rather than impression.

Choose the age band first and design to it. A curriculum built for children aged 7 to 14 can be gamified and made practical; content written for a wider band tends to become generic and loses the behavioural effect.

Treat volunteer selection as a design decision. Applying gender balance and regional distribution as explicit criteria produces a network that can deliver nationally, and certification and network membership are what keep volunteers engaged between campaigns.

Pair every field campaign with an open digital channel. The platform absorbs demand the field programme cannot serve, keeps the content available between campaigns and supplies usage data that field reporting cannot.

Plan for volunteer turnover rather than reacting to it. Annual trainer training sessions restore capacity and expand it at the same time, which is how the network moved from 69 to 120 trainers.

External Links

• Integrated annual report and sustainability disclosure

Source List

(1) Integrated annual report and sustainability disclosure