Report to Society 2025

Environmental

Environmental education

School gardens as learning spaces for sustainability and biodiversity

An awareness of sustainability often arises from direct experiences with nature and the environment. However, for many children today, it is no longer a matter of course to observe the growth and development of plants and animals for themselves. Many savings banks therefore support environmental education projects in which children and young people can experience nature at first hand and learn about it through hands-on activities.

School gardens are a prime example of this. They offer many pupils access to nature. Here, they can see how plants and animals develop alongside and in harmony with one another. And they can play an active role in helping to shape the garden themselves. Collaborative gardening in the school garden creates small moments of achievement and demonstrates very directly how humans contribute to biological processes.

40 years of the school garden competition in Forchheim

In the Bavarian district of Forchheim, school gardens are highly valued. This is further reinforced by the annual school garden competition, which has been held since 1986 and is sponsored by the State Education Authority and Savings Bank Forchheim with prize money totalling 10,000 euros. The prize money is channelled into the further development of the school gardens and supports new projects that further nurture the pupils’ creative potential. In this way, the gardens remain vibrant learning spaces where pupils can bring their ideas to life, gain practical experience of working with nature and develop a deeper understanding of ecological interrelationships.

Tiny Forest in Sindelfingen

But it is not only fruit and vegetable gardens that are suitable for environmental education: at the Gottlieb-Daimler School in Sindelfingen, a so-called ‘Tiny Forest’ is growing and thriving across an area of 100 square metres. The co-initiators of this project, as well as other ‘Tiny Forest’ projects in the Böblingen district, are the KreisSavings Bank Böblingen and the KreisSavings Bank Böblingen Social and Environmental Foundation, whose staff also planted 300 trees themselves. ‘Tiny Forests’, also known as small or micro-forests, are compact, densely planted wooded areas in urban settings. The concept was developed by the Japanese botanist Akira Miyazawi: native trees and shrubs are planted particularly closely together in a small area. As a result of competition, they develop into a robust ecosystem within a relatively short time. This enables the pupils at the Gottlieb-Daimler School not only to experience first-hand how a small forest is taking shape on their school grounds, but also to benefit from the many advantages for the microclimate and biodiversity.

Bringing sustainable thinking to life and embedding it in people’s everyday lives – that is the core idea behind many of the Savings Banks’s social initiatives. The support provided for school and nursery gardens or ‘Tiny Forests’ are two effective and compelling examples of this.