Large-scale banana plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean could face a “dramatic” reduction in “suitable” growing area by 2080 due to rising temperatures, a new study warns.
Banana production is a labour-intensive process and the $25bn banana industry provides employment for more than one million workers globally. Latin America and the Caribbean are responsible for 80% of the world’s banana exports.
The study, published in Nature Food, investigates how climate change could impact export-driven banana plantations in the world’s biggest banana-exporting region.
It finds rising temperatures will drive a 60% reduction in the land area currently suitable for large-scale banana plantations in the region by 2080.
As the suitable area for banana plantations shrinks, farmers will need to adapt through implementing irrigation, implementing drought-resilient varieties of banana and shifting their growing regions, the study says.
An expert not involved in the study warns that “the current intensive banana industrial model perpetuates certain injustices towards farmers”. She tells Carbon Brief that the research “provides valuable insight about the constraints [and] risks”, adding that it “should be a call for adaptation – and also transforming the industry for the better”.
The banana industry
Bananas are one of the most commonly exported and consumed fruits in the world and a key source of nutrition for more than four million people.
The banana sector is a growing industry, currently worth around $25bn globally. The map below shows the mass of bananas produced in 2022, in tonnes, per country.
While Asia is the world’s largest banana producer, Latin America and the Caribbean are responsible for around 80% of the world’s banana exports – particularly from Ecuador and Costa Rica.
More than 1,000 different varieties of bananas are grown around the world, with the sweet yellow Cavendish banana making up around half of global banana production. This cultivar is typically grown in large-scale monoculture plantations in Latin America, using extensive irrigation and drainage facilities. Large export plantations can be up to 5,000 hectares in size (50 square kilometres).
Mapping plantations
To assess the distribution of banana plantations throughout Latin America and the Caribbean, the authors developed a high-resolution map of banana production for the year 2019. They used data from NASA’s Sentinel-1 SAR and an algorithm to identify banana plantations in the satellite images.
The authors only include banana plantations larger than 0.5 hectares in area in their map, because the study focuses on bananas grown at a large scale for export. They also do not include banana production by smallholder farmers, as their crops are often in sparser, mixed-cropping systems that are harder to identify in images.
The authors identified and validated more than 360,000 plantations in total.
They authors combined their banana plantation distribution map with a wide range of climatic and socioeconomic data, including temperature, rainfall, elevation, soil acidity, latitude, irrigation infrastructure, human population density and distance to the nearest port.
To identify the conditions best suited for banana plantations, the authors identified ranges for each of these variables where 90% of mapped banana plantations were observed.
The results show that banana plantations are typically found at lower elevations and in more acidic soils than other croplands in the region. They are also found in areas with higher population density and close to ports. Three-quarters of the mapped banana plantations in this study are within 86km of the nearest port, the study finds.
Dr Varun Varma, the lead author of the study, is an ecosystems services modeller at Rothamsted Research in the UK. He tells Carbon Brief that large-scale banana farming “relies heavily on access to labour”. He adds:
“In these intensive export-focussed farms, bananas – a perishable product – are continuously harvested, processed, packaged and made ready for transport by sea in large shipping containers. Being closer to a port would be a logistical advantage.”
The authors also find that irrigation plays an important role in determining where bananas can grow.
Prof Matti Kummu from Aalto University’s water and development research group, who was not involved in the study, praises the authors for considering so many variables. He tells Carbon Brief that this is an “important and impressive study”, adding that its approach could be used for other similar crops.
Rising temperatures
Next, the authors modelled temperature and rainfall over Latin America and the Caribbean, using 12 climate models from the sixth coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP6) under the “middle-of-the-road” SSP2-4.5 warming scenario.
By combining simulations of temperature and rainfall across Latin America and the Caribbean with data on elevation and soil acidity, the authors find that around 3,340,000 square kilometres (km2) of land is currently “suitable” for banana plantations.
Central America, coastal Brazil and the northern and southern borders of the Amazon basin are the most suitable, they say.
Factoring in socioeconomic conditions, such as population density and distance to a port, shrinks the “suitable area” to 990,000km2. This “brings into focus how important socioeconomic factors are, and will be, in adapting to climate change”, Varma says.
The authors also investigated how climate change may impact the “suitable” area for banana plantations over the 21st century. The maps below show how changes in temperature (left) and rainfall (right) are expected to impact the suitability of land for banana plantations under the projected climate in 2061-80.
The colours indicate regions suitable for producing bananas for export in both the recent past (1970 to 2000) and future (blue), those suitable in the recent past, but not in future (red) and those that were not suitable in the recent past, but will be in the future (green).
The authors find that under the SSP2-4.5 scenario, “increasing temperature is the sole climatic driver of suitable area loss”. In contrast, changes in annual rainfall will not noticeably change the distribution of land suitable for banana plantations – partly due to the presence of irrigation, the authors say.
Overall, they find that changes in climate will shrink the area of land suitable for banana plantations by 60%, if no changes are made to irrigation infrastructure or other socioeconomic factors.
Dr Monica Ortiz is an environmental scientist and assistant professor at the University of Concepción in Chile, who was not involved in the study. She tells Carbon Brief:
“60% is no small figure and this means that banana-growers need to do climate-resilient planning to maintain their livelihood and business model.”
The paper finds that implementing more irrigation infrastructure where needed could expand the future suitable area. Adding this adaptation measure would mean that future climate change would only shrink the current area of land suitable for growing bananas by 41%.
The authors find that due to warming, the suitable area for banana production will decline by 2080 in most exporting regions in Latin America and the Caribbean. The study says that Colombia and Venezuela will become “almost entirely suboptimal for export production”.
The authors then used a series of equations developed in paper they published in 2019 to calculate banana yields from data on temperature and rainfall.
Yield in current banana producing areas will decline for most countries, the study says. It finds that “Ecuador and Brazil are the only major producers expected to see yield increases in current banana production areas due to climate change”.
Adaptation
As the area suitable for banana production shrinks, farmers will need to adapt to the changing conditions. These measures include maintaining irrigation supplies and breeding “drought-tolerant banana varieties”, the authors say.
However, they note that farmers in the global south “may be less able to adapt agricultural practices to cope with changing climate than their counterparts in wealthier countries”.
Prof Kenneth Feeley from the University of Miami was not involved in the study, but has conducted separate research on the impacts of climate change on banana growing regions.
He tells Carbon Brief that as a result of widespread irrigation, many growers have turned large areas of “pristine desert habitat” with low rainfall into banana plantations. This is a “major transformation of the ecosystem”, which may not be “good for the environment”, he warns.
Feeley adds that Cavendish bananas are also facing “attacks” from the fungus Fusarium, which are becoming a “major problem for banana production”. The fungus is spread through raindrops bouncing between plants, but the use of drip irrigation can “limit” the spread of the fungus, he explains.
Additionally, lead author Varma notes that rising temperatures are creating “increasingly inhospitable working conditions in this labour-intensive sector”.
Ortiz tells Carbon Brief that “the current intensive banana industrial model perpetuates certain injustices towards farmers”. She explains that farmers “work hard and are paid little”, adding that women are typically assigned the tasks that are paid the least.
She adds:
“The time is indeed ripe for change. I think the study provides valuable insight about the constraints, risks and should be a call for adaptation – and also transforming the industry for the better.”
The post Major banana exporters could face ‘60% drop’ in growing area due to warming appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Major banana exporters could face ‘60% drop’ in growing area due to warming
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Around 300 scientists, civil servants, journalists and climate experts took part in the 11th annual Carbon Brief quiz on Wednesday 18 March 2026.
For the second time, this year’s quiz was hosted by Octopus Energy at its headquarters in central London.
In total, 39 teams participated – 25 teams in person and 14 teams joining via Zoom.
Competing teams reflected a wide range of climate change and energy professionals. The list included journalists, civil servants, climate campaigners, policy advisers, energy experts and scientists.
Organisations represented included: Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India; New Scientist; the Times; Business Green; the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources (BSEER), UCL; Verisk Maplecroft; BBC; World Weather Attribution; Grantham Institute at Imperial; DESNZ; WWF; European Climate Foundation (ECF); the ENDS Report; C40 Cities; Ricardo; Met Office; Meliore; E3G; Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI); Energy Transitions Commission; Carbon Tracker; Ember; Royal Meteorological Society; Civil Service Climate and Environment Network (CSCEN); Changing Markets Foundation; Cerulogy; Oxford Sustainable Law Programme; Université de Lausanne; University of Exeter; Centre for Environment and Sustainability, University of Surrey; UK Parliament; Skeptical Science; ECIU (Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit); Octopus Energy; DeSmog; Department for Transport and Royal School of Mines.
Teams were tested with five rounds of questions – general knowledge, policy, science and two picture rounds. (See the slideshow of the questions and answers below).
After two hours of playing, this year’s winners were announced.
Comprised of players from the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) in India, last time’s second place team, “Emissions Impossible” won the coveted Carbon Brief trophy with a total score of 76 out of 100 available points.
In joint second place, with 59 points, were the “Potato-sized nodules”, a mixed team of journalists from New Scientist, the Times and Business Green.
Sharing second place, after leading at the half-way point, were “You cannot BSEERious” from the Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources at UCL.
In fourth place, with 57 points, were “Risky Quizness”, from Verisk Maplecroft.
A certificate was awarded to the BBC for the best team name, as voted for by Carbon Brief staff: “High hopes [low confidence]”.
See the full leaderboard:
All the questions and answers from this year’s quiz can be found in this PDF document.
This year’s trickiest round was picture round two, which asked teams to match the quote to the author, with an average score of 5.9 out of 20 available points.
No team correctly guessed that “Chris Funk: Drought, Flood, Fire” was the source of the quote: “How greenhouse gases warm the atmosphere is pretty straightforward. It is really important that we understand this. But almost nobody does, because it is not something that we are taught in school.”
Science was the second hardest round, earning an average score of 6.1 points out of 20.
No team correctly guessed “religious leaders” as the least trustworthy source of climate information, according to a 2025 study using public polling from seven global south countries.
The highest-scoring round was general knowledge, with an average of 13.8 out of 20 questions answered correctly.
Carbon Brief would like to thank all the teams who took part and we look forward to hosting the quiz again in the spring of 2027.
If you would like to participate in next year’s quiz, please contact us in advance at quiz AT carbonbrief DOT org.
Photos by Kerry Cleaver
The post The Carbon Brief Quiz 2026 appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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