ANTALYA, Türkiye. VakıfBank captain and national team middle blocker Zehra Güneş brought a defender’s instinct to a different net on Friday, telling young people at the COP31 climate summit that the gardens and open fields where she grew up must stay open for the children coming after her.
Güneş, 27, appeared at the Türkiye Children and Youth Pavilion in the summit’s Blue Zone on November 13 for a dialogue with UNICEF Türkiye Representative Paolo Marchi. She has served as UNICEF Türkiye’s Child Rights Advocate since November 2024, a role she took on just before World Children’s Day.
Her memories were specific. Evening games of skipping rope, chasing a big ball across a large field with friends, play that stretched long after dark, all of it, she said, is what made her feel she was fully living as a child before volleyball became a career. “We need to act at very young ages, we need to see our future,” she said, according to Anadolu Agency’s report of the session. “In my opinion, the climate crisis is very important for children’s lives, in terms of the future.”
Marchi put a number on the stakes. “Around the world, 1.1 billion children, in other words nearly half of the child population, are directly affected by the consequences of the climate crisis,” he said at the same event, describing disrupted schooling, harder access to health care and shrinking room for sport and play.
Güneş also made the case for sport as a channel. “Sport, to me, is a very unifying bond,” she said. “Sometimes, without needing a single word, it is a field where you explain what needs to be done just by showing your fight on the court.” Team sport, she argued, builds the habits of sharing and fighting together that climate action also runs on.
The appearance sat inside a busy day for Turkish volleyball. Later on November 13 she joined a session titled “The Nature of Sport: Teaming Up for the Future” alongside Giovanni Guidetti, her longtime coach at VakıfBank, linking elite performance culture to collective climate effort. Her club, a COP31 partner presence at the summit, used the window to announce 1.7 billion dollars in green financing agreements, according to Turkish business daily Dünya.
Who is delivering this message is part of why it travels. Güneş stands 1.98 meters, plays middle blocker, wears number 18, and has anchored Türkiye’s biggest back-to-back summers: the 2023 Volleyball Nations League and European Championship double, when she was named best middle blocker at both, then a second Nations League title in July 2026 and a retained European crown in September that qualified Türkiye for the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics.
The club record is just as heavy. Made VakıfBank captain at the start of the 2024-25 season, she lifted a seventh European crown in May 2026 and counts two club world championships, six Turkish league titles and a 2022 league Most Valuable Player award on her resume. She joined the club’s system at 12, logged loan spells at İstanbul Büyükşehir Belediyesi and Beşiktaş, and has been a first-team fixture since 2017-18.
Her UNICEF role has a precise focus. The agency’s appointment announcement tasked her with championing girls’ rights, especially empowerment and protection for adolescent girls, and the launch ceremony in Istanbul was attended by Marchi and VakıfBank officials, Türkiye Today reported at the time. The COP31 session extended that work into climate, the arena UNICEF says is already shaping half the world’s childhoods, and it puts her in the small circle of UNICEF-linked figures Hypefresh has covered, from Millie Bobby Brown, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador for years before her.
The summit itself is a first. COP31, running November 9 to 20 at the Antalya Expo Center, is the first UN climate conference hosted by Türkiye, which holds the presidency while Australia chairs the formal negotiations. UN News reported that negotiators are being pushed to shape a political agreement from the opening days rather than the usual final-week scramble.
For Güneş, the setting was the point. She told the pavilion audience she felt fortunate to hold a platform at this stage of her life and hoped more children and young people would get the chance to speak about the future they will inherit, Milliyet reported from the pavilion, and her remarks kept circling back to the same image, open ground, evening light, a ball, friends.
The throughline is not complicated. A player whose job is stopping attacks at the net spent her summit day arguing that green space is children’s infrastructure, the training ground for the skills Marchi described, and that climate policy decides whether it survives. Turkish coverage of the session closed on the same pairing of green space and childhood that she opened with, and Marchi backed it with the program note that sport and play build skills children use for life.
Climate advocacy has taken many forms this year, from activists gluing themselves to a showroom floor to venture money for butter made from carbon. A volleyball captain telling a UN summit to protect the fields she played on as a child was the version Antalya got on Friday.
