Climatelinks Photo Gallery

A woman potato farmer inspects a demonstration farm in Hooghly, West Bengal. With a group of other women, she has leased land and entered the PepsiCo supply chain as an independent farmer for the first time. This was also the first women-led PepsiCo demonstration farm in West Bengal, increasing recognition of women’s role in agriculture. Over the past two years, USAID and PepsiCo have reached over 1,000 women farmers with improved agriculture techniques and provided gender awareness training to all PepsiCo staff in West Bengal. The innovative partnership between the USAID-funded Integrated Land and Resource Governance Program and PepsiCo is demonstrating that women’s empowerment can increase the potato supplier base for PepsiCo, improve yields and profitability for rural farmers and PepsiCo, and promote the adoption of sustainable and regenerative farming practices that advance USAID’s and PepsiCo’s global climate change commitments. Working in partnership with women, USAID and PepsiCo are learning from women in the community about the constraints and opportunities for their increased participation and benefit sharing in the PepsiCo potato supply chain.

Dzaleka Refugee camp, Dowa District, August 2020. Musago Mirida is a mother of 3 and a refugee from Burundi in Malawi. She was born a refugee in Tanzania in the 1970s. In 2012, she went back to Burundi and stayed there for two years. In Burundi, she lived along the lake Tanganyika. Her husband was a fisherman and she was cultivating rice, sweet potatoes, plantain. When they came back to Burundi, neighbors were not happy since they were competing for natural resources (water and land) which have become more scarce with the impact of climate change. This evolved into an open conflict and because of violence, she had to leave Burundi to Malawi in 2014. Now, she depends on the food assistance and she works in people’s fields to have some money to buy clothes for her children. Thanks to USAID Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance (BHA) support, Musago and 45,000 refugees living in Malawi are receiving cash assistance which enable them to buy food in the local market (such as rice in the picture).

This photo was taken in Silvia, Cauca, Colombia, and shows a group of Guambianos Indigenous people, who are working with Paramos and Forest Activity of USAID in the conservation of Paramos, one of the most important ecosystems in Colombia that provide water for 70% of the Colombian population.

The Paramos Ecosystem, according to investigations, can hide more carbon in the ground than tropical forests. Protecting and conserving these ecosystems is one of the main goals of the Colombian State as they aim to meet the commitments of the Paris Agreement.

USAID's Paramos and Forests Activity is supporting the Colombian State in the protection of 100.000 hectares of paramos through changes in cattle and agriculture, and payments for environmental services, among other mechanisms.

The Indigenous Cabildo of Guambia is one of the partners of USAID in this goal.

Cattle are being directed into pens for feeding in Lukange, Zimbabwe, in September of 2019. Droughts and floods happen with increasing frequency in Zimbabwe and other countries in Southern Africa. Small-scale farmers who depend on rain-fed agriculture are hit the hardest by the unpredictable cycles of drought and flood. Through demonstration sites, CRS is teaching low-income animal farmers in these affected areas new agricultural methods that help them plant drought-tolerant fodder crops to feed their animals.

Through the Zimbabwe Integrated Agriculture and Nutrition (Ag-Nut) project, CRS implements an integrated Value Chain approach in 15 rural wards in Beitbridge District, Matabeleland South Province. The Ag-Nut project uses Farmer Learning Centers (FLCs) as entry platforms into the community; teaching smallholder farmers to use improved forage and feed technologies to increase goat value chain productivity in the smallholder sector. CRS partners with ILRI and Caritas Masvingo on the Ag-Nut project.

USAID’s Clean Cities, Blue Ocean (CCBO) program – the agency’s flagship program for combating global ocean plastic pollution – enhances solid waste systems and capabilities to make sizeable contributions to climate change mitigation and adaptation. By building circular economies and improving system efficiencies, CCBO helps countries and communities around the world address the root causes of climate change and minimize their potential future impact, while also building more resilient systems and cities that can withstand and adapt to the current and anticipated effects of climate change. Samaná Province, Dominican Republic, primarily a tourist destination, produces over 134 tons of waste each day. Much of this waste is disposed of in open dumps, which emit methane and commonly spark air-polluting fires, as well as leak into local rivers and bays, flowing out to the sea. By remediating and beginning the closure of open dumps in the DR, CCBO has secured an estimated 31,345 Metric Tons (MT) – approximately 69 million lbs – from leaking into the environment and 217,675 MT – approximately 480 million lbs – of waste was aggregated through program technical assistance. This man, pictured here, walks through the open dump prior to its closure, picking more valuable pieces of waste.

Workers carry piles of bricks on their heads in a brick factory in Narayanganj, Bangladesh. Brick kilns emit large quantities of environmental pollutants into the atmosphere causing harmful impact on agricultural yields, climate and health.

Silverio Mendez embraces his daughter on their family farm in January of 2019. He and his wife Irma Mendez live in Barrio El Cedro, Chiquimula, Guatemala with their 5 daughters and 2 sons. Silverio has lived here all of his life and his family has been on this land for approximately three generations. The area where they live is known as the Dry Corridor, where water is in short supply due to extended droughts.

CRS works in this area with the Water Smart Agriculture program (ASA) to help farmers to improve the soil quality and its ability to hold moisture by applying Conservation Agriculture techniques. These techniques protect and restore vital soil and water resources. Relatively easy to implement, water-smart agriculture is cost-effective, and delivers fast results and long-term benefits such as sustainability and resilience.  This helps farmers, crops and communities thrive, which leads to more secure and prosperous farms in areas where farmers now face extreme poverty because of an increasingly erratic and extreme climate. CRS worked with Silverio to adopt these practices and he has been able to see that the soil humidity is much greater in the plot with cover crop.

After going over the pass and crossing into the true Central Highlands, views like this were the norm. Mountains, pine trees, coffee plants as far as the eye could see.

Villages like the one seen in the middle of this shot were common - series of houses and shops right alongside the main road. Even in shots like this, I see a bit of the deforestation that reminds me of this year's contest theme around people and climate change. Much of the landscape seen here is beautiful and untouched, but where it has been touched, the natural environment is replaced or altered.

This evocative view was found outside of the "inn" that my motorcycle driver, Mr. Hiep, selected for the final night of our six-night tour through Vietnam's Central Highlands. The five-room inn was full of heavy, hand-hewn wooden furniture, likely made from the same trees that used to stand on the right mountainside in this image. Just a short walk away, out of this shot on the right, a large waterfall cascaded down the mountainside and under a bridge, and gave us constant company with its soothing sound. 

As seen here, one side of the valley was untouched jungle - beautiful to look at, and somewhat intimidating due to how thick and primeval it looked from a distance. The other side of the valley was a mix of inhabited land, cleared mountainside, and closer to the waterfall, similarly untouched as the left side of the valley. The difference between the two sides of the river is quite stark, and serves as a reminder of how a single paved road can really open up and change the future for land that had been too difficult to access in previous times. There are a lot of resources in that thick jungle, including the land itself, and in a country like Vietnam, extraction of those resources can bring a lot of benefits to people who need them. Sustainable land management can stem the damage done by human intervention, but only if systems are put in place to encourage—or even incentivize—such methods. 

It rained much of that last day or so, which was not pleasant to deal with while riding on the back of a motorcycle. However, the rain, clouds and fog made for beautiful scenes, especially when we drove along stretches of road where the land had not been so heavily cleared. 

The goal of my project is to teach and encourage youth in schools and communities to learn about the climate crisis, develop a solution for an issue they are passionate about, and take action to lead real, powerful environmental change in their communities. Working with locals and stakeholders around the community, I will create a plan for change and to achieve goals aimed at addressing climate change and ecosystem destruction. This plan will assist all efforts to shift into regeneration. It will also assist in changing laws and policies in the environment where all of this takes place. I will be directly reaching out to different communities in order to have their input and see if they want to collaborate.

William Sanico resides in a barangay (village) in Bago City, Negros Occidental, that is located within the buffer zone of Mt. Kanlaon Natural Park. He is a special kind of farmer. He farms green charcoal for a living.

In the province of Negros Occidental, the popular local grilled chicken dish called “inasal” drives the demand for charcoal and fuelwood. Because of this, locals would cut trees inside and around the park to produce and sell charcoal as their means of livelihood..

USAID B+WISER helped the city expand and realign this initiative to also mitigate deforestation due to charcoal making and timber poaching, and increase awareness on forest conservation. The program also helped Bago City develop a payment for ecosystem services mechanism to generate funds to support this program and other forest and watershed conservation activities.

Today, William is among over 100 farmers supported by this USAID B+WISER Project-enhanced project, benefitting from environmentally sustainable livelihood and improved income, while also helping alleviate deforestation and advocating forest protection and conservation.

Participating in this agroforestry program, William is happy. Not only is he able to provide for his family, he is also helping save the remaining forest of Mt. Kanlaon Natural Park.

Samuel is an ex-combatant who was part of a communist rebel group in the Philippines. To him, the days of intense fighting between the rebels and the military are a grim reminder of the senselessness of war.

He is among the forest guards that the DENR, through the USAID B+WISER program, trained on forest protection using the Lawin system. With the mobilization of Samuel and his fellow forest guards as Lawin patrollers, the DENR was able to strengthen forest protection in the region and expand patrol coverage to other identified hotspot areas in the Cordilleras. Samuel says that as forest guards, he and his team patrol the forest very strategically. “We have lived in the mountains for the longest time. We know where the illegal activities are happening and the possible areas where they can also happen,” he said confidently.

Bae Inatlawan, also called Adelina, devoted herself to leading her people in protecting the sacred mountain. “I teach the younger generation about our culture and how important it is to protect the forest,” she said. She believes that for her community to thrive in a modern world, culture and development must go hand in hand. With Bae at the helm, the tribe partnered with the Philippine government, NGOs, the development sector, and other Mt. Kitanglad tribes to protect the forests in their ancestral domain and advance the educational enlightenment of Kitanglad’s indigenous youth.

When he was still young, Emiliano used to trek through the forests of Mt. Kitanglad with his father. In one of their excursions, they spotted an eagle. Emiliano told his father that they should shoot it, but the latter vehemently refused and warned him that if they killed the eagle, they would anger the spirits. The Talaandig tribe, to which Emiliano’s family belongs, believe that bad luck would befall a family if any member killed anything that lives in the forest. Since then, Emiliano vowed to protect the eagles for the rest of his life, and part of this mission is protecting the forests where the eagles live.

His dedication to protecting eagles, and the fact that he had seen all six living Philippine eagles in the mountain, earned him the title “Eagle Master” among his peers. In one of his forest patrols in early 2018, Emiliano discovered his seventh eagle, then estimated to be about three months old. He named the young raptor “Pamarahig”, a local word which means “plea”, to resound his earnest request: “I am reaching out to the world that we should protect forests and wildlife.” For Emiliano, Pamarahig symbolizes this very important message.

This picture shows CaRE-NGO Kaduna's Climate-Smart Agriculture Centre where they do rooftop farming, corridor vegetable farming, grow yams in sacks, vegetative propagation of trees, a tree with more than 10 varieties of mangoes, fish farming, grasscutter farming, rabbit farming, snail farming and lots more; in the urban center. These pictures evidently demonstrate the effort of Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Small Grant Programmes (SGP) of the United Nations Development Programme in Nigeria and CaRE-NGO Kaduna, in the fight against climate change. These facilities are currently open and accepting visitors to see what is being done in this center. The source of these pictures is CaRE-NGO Kaduna Climate-Smart Agriculture Centre in Sabon Tasha in Kaduna.

This picture shows CaRE-NGO Kaduna's Climate-Smart Agriculture Centre where they do rooftop farming, corridor vegetable farming, grow yams in sacks, vegetative propagation of trees, a tree with more than 10 varieties of mangoes, fish farming, grasscutter farming, rabbit farming, snail farming and lots more; in the urban center. These pictures evidently demonstrate the effort of Global Environmental Facility (GEF) Small Grant Programmes (SGP) of the United Nations Development Programme in Nigeria and CaRE-NGO Kaduna, in the fight against climate change. These facilities are currently open and accepting visitors to see what is being done in this center. The source of these pictures is CaRE-NGO Kaduna Climate-Smart Agriculture Centre in Sabon Tasha in Kaduna.