Climatelinks Photo Gallery

Mma Azara leads her team in cracking African shea tree nuts with stakes, after which they will boil them and use their shells for biomass cake to cook and process the nuts into shea butter. Using the biomass instead of discarding it as waste goes a long way towards saving the forest and conserving the environment. 

Morris Kwaku Nu walks through his cocoa farm in Asankrangwa, Ghana. Under a payment for ecosystem services (PES) scheme supported by the USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance program and Hershey’s, Morris and other farmers in his community receive annual payments for maintaining naturally occurring trees on their cocoa farms. These trees provide needed shade to cocoa trees, protecting them from the sun and increasing productivity. Artisanal mining is a growing threat in the area, so PES systems can help incentivize farmers to maintain their naturally occurring trees, which supports Ghana’s larger climate change goals and ability to meet nationally determined contributions.

Grace Annison and her husband Kofi Acquas have been farming cocoa for over 40 years in Assin Fosu, Ghana. Cocoa dominates the Ghanaian economy, but low global prices, tree disease, and changing climate conditions make it increasingly hard to earn a living from cocoa farming. As a cash crop, cocoa is often considered a man’s domain, yet in reality, cocoa farming is a family affair. Under a partnership between USAID (through the Integrated Land and Resource Governance program) and cocoa commodity broker Ecom (which sources cocoa for major brands like Hershey’s, Mars, and Lindt), USAID is helping Ecom strengthen its gender equality and social inclusion approach to better target women and men farmers in cocoa value chains. This includes providing extension support to women and men at times/locations where women can participate, supporting farmers to adopt alternative livelihoods to diversify their incomes, and establishing village savings and loans associations to help families save for new businesses, home improvements, or support during the lean season. Helping cocoa farming families become more resilient to a changing climate supports both food security and climate adaptation goals.

On World Pangolin Day, WABiLED in partnership with A Rocha Ghana raise awareness about the importance of pangolins along the Accra-Kumasi highway where they are often hunted for bush meat. Pangolins play a role in climate change mitigation through their impact on ecosystems, particularly in their role as seed dispersers and insect controllers. 

Play Your Part Foundation engaged students in some basic schools for a clean up exercise through practical education on how they can keep their environment clean, the trash was segregated according to their types.

This is how some water bodies in Ghana has been polluted with plastic through improper disposal of trash. This water body service as a source of water for domestic use in the community, but plastics has been a very big disaster for the water and can not be used by the community members due to its current state.

In Ghana, climate change is causing shorter, more severe wet seasons and longer, more severe dry seasons, which makes relying on rainwater increasingly difficult. To build climate resilience in the town of Tinjase, Ghana, USAID and its implementing partner Global Communities have installed solar-powered groundwater pumps that provide water throughout the year to 9,000 - 10,000 people and other community resources, including: one school, one health center, one police station, one customs station, eight standpipes, and 46 direct household connections.

This photo was taken in Kpanshegu, in the northern region of Ghana, on June 29, 2022.

Shea trees grow naturally on 63 million hectares of parkland in traditional farming systems in Africa. Traditional agroforests are ancient farming systems where trees are integrated with crops on smallholder farms, creating an agroforestry landscape that supports shea farming communities. This style of farming brings value to the farm and benefits the environment. Beekeeping introduces biodiversity through plant pollination, and the trees and crop diversification improve soil health, leading to less drought and floods and increasing yields. The waste produced from shea butter production and the leaves from shea and other trees are used as fertilizer. The success of this ecosystem comes from the interdependence of these three components, resulting in climate change resistance, reduced use of chemically-produced and costly farm inputs, and the provision of habitats for bees and other insects and wildlife. Shea is sold during the farming lean season, which makes it particularly valuable to bridge the gap until the main harvest is collected. But these shea-producing regions are more and more affected by climate change, with the parklands and communities experiencing higher temperatures, lower rainfall, and more droughts, which reduces farmlands, crop yields, and income. Shea tree populations have also been declining due to tree removal, particularly for charcoal use, lack of new planting, long gestation periods, reduced fallow periods, and poor parkland management practices. The Global Shea Alliance is working to encourage the reintroduction of the agroforestry farm model to capitalize on the climate change potential that shea trees have in the agroforestry parkland ecosystems.

Technical staff of A Rocha-Ghana and a community women’s group member collect field data in the West Gonja District in Northern Ghana to help plan forest restoration activities in areas degraded by charcoal production. This work is part of an effort by the Center for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Services (CERSGIS) and SERVIR West Africa to help local, regional, and national stakeholders develop a tool based on earth-observation technology to identify and monitor charcoal production sites and survey tree cover density change. The resulting maps serve as a useful advocacy tool for engaging stakeholders and decision-makers at the district, local, and community levels in designing climate change mitigation interventions and addressing behavior change. Charcoal production degrades forests in many African countries, and successful programs to reduce this degradation either by preventing it in the first place or reforesting degraded land can yield valuable lessons for other geographies facing similar challenges.

Densu Estuary, Ghana. September 10, 2019. A member of the Densu Oyster Pickers Association (DOPA) looks at some of the 20,000 mangrove seedlings her women's association has planted during a boat trip to monitor oyster habitat conditions. On the Densu Delta, overharvesting, a new dam that reduces salinity in the water and mangrove degradation have contributed to declining oyster populations. USAID's Advancing Gender in the Environment (AGENT) partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) is supporting work in Ghana, Indonesia, and the Philippines to address women's empowerment, access to finance, and sustainable fisheries management. Here, IUCN hears from the women of DOPA, supported by USAID's Sustainable Fisheries Management Program (SFMP) in Ghana, during a field mission in innovating and implementing ecosystem approaches to fisheries management, which includes repopulating important oyster habitats: mangroves.

This project improved water access to six beneficiary communities through decentralized water treatment kiosks and improved sanitation facilities and hygiene behaviors for schools in those communities. Over 5,000 students and teachers gained water and sanitation access at school. Over 1,000 people gained household water access and six schools were measurably impacted by project activities. Ultimately, 60,000 people with limited water access were reached through the kiosks.