Raymond’s hands look worn from sourcing water for people in his community.
In an image, his left hand is shown draped over a block of wood, reflecting years of hard work and determination as he pushes a cart filled with pails of water through the streets.
The picture was taken by Danelle Fraser, a woman in her thirties who lives in Rose Town, Jamaica. She puts herself, and her family, into the photo essay, revealing how they must wake up early every day and travel to neighbouring communities to fetch water.
The residents of Rose Town, in West Kingston, have been forced to do this for decades after their own water pipes stopped working.
The photos are personal history, depicting the efforts of local people making do without access to a reliable water supply, leaving their community less resilient and more exposed to climate-related shocks.
“It has been over 23 years now since I saw water running through the pipes of my house in Gordon Lane,” writes Danelle in the essay.
Women’s lived experience
She is one of six women in Jamaica chosen to take part in the first phase of the Envisioning Resilience initiative in 2023. Led by the NAP Global Network and Lensational, a non-profit social enterprise, the project is designed to enable women to tell their own climate stories through photography.
So far, these stories have ranged from how street vendors are surviving extreme heat to the Rastafari community’s attempts to adapt to drought.
The project, extended to another seven women in 2025, was born out of an understanding that women and girls are more severely impacted by climate change. The UN estimates the crisis is pushing tens of millions more women than men into poverty and food insecurity around the world. Global warming is worsening gender inequalities and making it harder for women to survive and become more resilient to extreme weather events.
“Women are one of many vulnerable groups and one that often lacks agency when it comes to decisions of critical importance such as climate change,” explained Orville Grey, head of secretariat for the NAP Global Network.
“Empowering women to speak to their lived experience [and] capture that through creative communication tools such as photography is a unique way to get them involved in the process of developing adaptation plans that are fit for purpose and inclusive,” he added.
The power of individual action
Starting in 2021, Envisioning Resilience initially ran pilots in Ghana and Kenya before expanding to Jamaica in 2023. The initiative formed a new partnership with GirlsCARE, a feminist climate justice organisation, based in the Caribbean country. Ayesha Constable, founder of GirlsCARE, told Climate Home News that participants on the programme are selected through a targeted call shared across their national network.
“We intentionally focus on reaching young women and girls from vulnerable communities, including rural and inner city areas,” she said. “The selection process… ensures a cohort that is both engaged and reflective of the communities most impacted by climate change,” she added.
The group goes through a training programme of between four to six months, learning professional photography skills through workshops and individual assignments. Participants are also provided with policy training and a grounding in how their stories are connected to wider climate concerns.
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“We sometimes say if you only had one day to tell this story, what words would you use, what actions would you take to do so?” explained Lydia Wanjiku, CEO of Lensational.
Envisioning Resilience offers a rare opportunity for women from different backgrounds to tell these stories, reach a wider audience, and gain valuable skills along the way. The photo essays are collected online and the stories have received widespread media attention.
“Ultimately, we want participants to embrace their own agency, and recognise the power of individual and collective action in driving change, and to carry forward the principles of justice, care and equity in whatever paths they choose,” added Constable of GirlsCARE.
From pilots to policy
The wider intention in Jamaica is that the photo essays influence the development and implementation of new climate policies. When the stories are complete, they are shared in a dialogue that brings the newly trained photographers together with adaptation policymakers.
According to Angie Dazé, director of gender equality and social inclusion at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), the policy dialogues “flip the script, allowing the conversation to be led by the women and their stories, placing the government representatives in listening mode”.
Lensational is seeing interest from some countries in using the programme as a core part of national policy processes. The essays have validated some issues that government departments have known about, while others have shone a light on new areas of concern.
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“We have really tried to embed policy and storytelling elements into the training, ensuring the projects are more targeted and aligned with what policymakers are working on,” added Wanjiku. The intention is to support women to articulate their stories with policy concepts in mind, broadening their reach and impact.
The approach seems to be paying off in Jamaica. Wayne Robertson, permanent secretary at Jamaica’s Ministry of Water, Environment and Climate Change, said the initiative had “meaningfully supported the Jamaican government in strengthening climate adaptation policy development by bridging the gap between technical planning and lived community experience”.
He added that the photo essays are supporting Jamaica’s National Adaptation Plan process and contributing to existing efforts by reinforcing the need for “inclusive, locally informed and participatory adaptation planning” and allowing for “a more people-centred understanding of climate risk.”
Jamaica’s growing climate impacts
Jamaica is a natural choice to run an initiative of this kind. As a small island developing state in the Caribbean, it is vulnerable to rising sea levels, coastal erosion and intense cyclones and hurricanes. A 2024 USAID assessment found that these stressors are likely to increase due to climate change.
Grey, of the NAP Global Network, commented that Jamaica is “dealing with rising temperatures impacting ambient heat both in day and night-time, increased severity of hurricanes, longer duration droughts, increased variability in rainfall, increased impacts of coastal erosion due to storms… and warmer oceans”. These climate stresses all have economic impacts on agriculture, tourism, fisheries and productivity.
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Many Jamaicans now have direct experience of what it means to live in a hotter world. In October 2025, Hurricane Melissa, a Category 5 storm, battered the island, causing multiple fatalities and almost $9 billion in economic damages. Researchers rank Melissa as one of the strongest storms ever recorded – with winds of up to 185mph (295km/h) – and the costliest hurricane in Jamaica’s history.
Climate change played a direct role in making the storm worse, according to a study from Imperial College London. Its storm model, called IRIS, found that climate change increased Melissa’s extreme rainfall by 16%, with a hurricane of its kind made four times more likely due to rising temperatures.
Collective action for resilience
Surrounded by the devastation of Hurricane Melissa, the new recruits to the Envisioning Resilience initiative picked up their cameras to record the event.
Ashlee Gooden travelled to Treasure Beach on Jamaica’s south coast a few days after the hurricane made landfall. She spent time documenting how one family, the Ritchies, had prepared for what was to come. Fishermen tied down the zinc roof, with sandbags placed on top for extra support. Plywood was nailed to windows, and essential food items stockpiled in the days leading up to the storm.
Gooden’s essay demonstrates not only the physical impacts of Hurricane Melissa – destroyed businesses and beach debris – but how the close community has bounced back, although a full recovery could take years. “One member of the community even opened their backyard to be used as a makeshift trail, allowing residents to bypass the blocked main road,” she writes.
No one left behind
The UN reports that in recent years the development of National Adaptation Plans under the UN climate process has moved from formulation to “implementation readiness”.
As adaptation policy matures, the photo essays produced by women on the Envisioning Resilience initiative are supporting governments to create plans that are more sensitive to the climate-related issues communities are now facing.
Jamaican official Robertson said the initiative “strengthens gender-responsive adaptation by creating space for women, youth, and community members to share their experiences and priorities”.
While much work has been done to centre women’s issues and decision-making within the climate debate, researchers acknowledge it is still not a high priority for some countries. The photo essays can help change that, by providing an insight into stories that “don’t typically get heard in adaptation policy conversations”, according to IISD’s Dazé.
“The project is about a shift in mindset on the role that women are playing and their adaptive capacity. Women are resilient in their own right,” she added. “Women are already adapting to climate change, and policymakers are getting to see them as agents of change.”
Adam Wentworth is a freelance journalist based in Brighton, UK
