Living Through a Changing Climate: Stress, Trauma, and Gendered Resilience Among Women in Coastal and Northern Ghana

ABSTRACT Climate change is reshaping everyday life in Ghana through coastal erosion, flooding, erratic rainfall, water scarcity, extreme heat, and agricultural insecurity. This study examines how these changes produce stress, trauma, and gendered resilience among women in Salakope and Choggu Yapalsi, two climate‐vulnerable communities in coastal and northern Ghana. Guided by Feminist Political Ecology and the Transactional Theory of Stress and Coping, the study used a qualitative multiple case study design. Data were generated through in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with sixteen (16) women and analyzed using Thematic Network Analysis. Findings show that climate change affects women's mental wellbeing through ecological loss, livelihood disruption, caregiving overload, heat‐related bodily strain, domestic insecurity, and displacement trauma. Fear, sadness, exhaustion, anxiety, and emotional instability emerged as affective conditions of everyday climate vulnerability. Yet women were not passive victims. They mobilized social support, spirituality, livelihood diversification, savings groups, and grassroots collective action to sustain hope and agency. The study argues that climate vulnerability must be understood as material, emotional, gendered, and politically situated. It contributes to climate justice debates by centering women's lived emotional worlds in rural Ghana.