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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
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An older teaching about land acknowledgement
As I have come to understand the spirit and intention of land acknowledgement, I often return to fond memories of my grandmother and her words of wisdom. She taught that the health of the places we call home comes first, because the wellbeing of the people depends on it.
In her teaching, land acknowledgement began with the land. Long before it became a paragraph read at the start of a meeting, it was a way of recognizing a homeland: its waters, its species, its seasons, and the spirit that revealed whether the place was well.
Her teaching echoes a practice found across many Indigenous Nations. Haudenosaunee gatherings, for example, have long opened with the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, the Thanksgiving Address, often translated as “the words that come before all else.” The speaker greets and gives thanks to the people, the earth, the waters, the plants, the animals, the winds, the sun, the moon and the stars. Only after everything that sustains life has been acknowledged does the gathering turn to its own business.
That order changes what an acknowledgement is for. Its purpose was to share the story of a place with neighbours and to draw them into the work of tending it. People entered the story second, as the ones responsible for what had just been named.
Understood this way, an acknowledgement does more than open a meeting. It asks us to reconsider where we stand, and what we owe the ground beneath us.
Nations among nations
In her teaching, people are one nation among many. The salmon are a nation. So are the cedars, the bison, the medicine plants, and the pollinators. Each belongs to a place, carries its own responsibilities, and offers gifts no other nation can give.
This idea of kinship runs through many Indigenous philosophies. The phrase “all my relations,” heard in ceremonies and gatherings across Turtle Island, is a reminder that family extends beyond people to the animals, plants, waters and lands that make life possible. Some Indigenous languages carry the same understanding in their grammar, speaking of many plants, animals and natural forces as living beings rather than objects.
Sovereignty, understood through this relationship, is a kind of standing more than a form of control. Each nation belongs fully to its place and carries its share of that place’s life. No nation thrives alone, and none thrives by taking over the whole.
The land is also the source of instruction. Over generations, people watched how a river valley or a stretch of prairie kept itself well: who arrived when, who fed whom, and how much could be taken before the giving stopped. In my grandmother’s telling, those observations became instructions, and those instructions helped shape law and protocol. They guided when to harvest, where to camp, how to enter a neighbour’s territory, and what was owed in return.
Indigenous legal scholars today often describe this as law that comes from the land itself, learned by watching how living systems sustain one another. A plainer name for it is knowing how to live somewhere.
The host and the guest
One of the clearest teachings in this understanding of the world is the relationship between host and guest. My grandmother invited us to recognize that relationship in the lives of plants and animals.
A host prepares the place before anyone arrives. A beaver family dams a stream, and the pond becomes a home for fish, frogs, birds and plants. A fallen tree becomes a nurse log, feeding the next generation of seedlings as it returns to the soil.
A host offers first. A flowering plant sets out nectar. A berry bush ripens fruit. These provisions come in their own season, not whenever a visitor happens to want them.
A host also makes its presence known. Birdsong, scent and the marks left along a trail tell newcomers that a place is already inhabited. The visitor does not arrive in an empty world.
The guest has responsibilities too. A guest attends to the season and to what the place can offer. A guest does not assume that everything within reach is theirs to take. A guest leaves something that helps sustain the relationship.
A bee takes nectar and carries pollen. Read through this teaching, that exchange offers an image of visiting well: receiving a gift while helping the host continue its life.
Many Indigenous harvesting protocols carry the same ethic into daily practice: ask before taking, take only what is needed, offer thanks, and leave enough for others and for the plant or animal to recover.
None of this suggests that every relationship in nature is peaceful or generous. These are ways of seeing responsibilities that people can learn to carry.
Everyone is both
No being is only a host or only a guest.
A tree makes room for other life while depending on soil, water, sunlight, fungi, and relationships beyond itself. People, too, may welcome others into their homes while remaining dependent on the larger homeland that sustains them.
The distinction between host and guest is therefore about roles, not ranks. Everyone receives. Everyone has something to give.
The question is whether the exchange sustains the place.
A visitor who takes without restraint leaves less for those who come next. A host who neglects the place has less to offer. Both have responsibilities, and neither can fulfil them alone.
This is the heart of reciprocity, a principle found across Indigenous philosophies: relationships stay healthy when gifts move in both directions. The Haudenosaunee teaching of the seventh generation extends that exchange across time, asking that decisions made today leave the place well for those not yet born.
Mutual benefit begins here, with the recognition that different beings carry different gifts and obligations.
What people carry forward
My grandmother’s teaching connects these relationships to the ways people meet their neighbours.
The host prepares a place, offers food and rest, and explains where the visitor has arrived. The guest makes themselves known, explains why they have come, listens to the terms of the visit, and brings something in return. The gift may be material. It may also be labour, knowledge, news, or a commitment to help.
Nations around the Great Lakes carried this ethic into treaty. The Dish with One Spoon, an agreement among the Haudenosaunee, Anishinaabe and allied Nations, describes shared hunting grounds as a single dish. Everyone eats from it with one spoon, takes only what they need, leaves enough for others, and keeps the dish clean. The Two Row Wampum, between the Haudenosaunee and European newcomers, shows two vessels travelling side by side on the same river, each keeping its own ways and neither steering the other.
In this understanding, acknowledgement is more than naming the people associated with a territory. It is learning enough about a homeland to behave responsibly within it.
Whose home is this? What sustains it? What laws and agreements guide our presence? What can we receive, and what must we return?
These questions make acknowledgement a relationship rather than a recital.
They also make it diplomatic. A guest who recognizes the host’s homeland recognizes that they have entered a place with its own relationships and responsibilities. A host who welcomes the guest makes room for an encounter governed by those relationships.
Neither arrives without standing. Neither arrives without obligations.
Beginning with place
I write from the shores of the Bay of Quinte. Here, the teaching asks me to begin with the water, the shoreline, and the life they sustain. Before I describe myself, I must attend to where I am.
That does not make people or history less important. It places them within the homeland that gives them meaning. The people, their laws, their agreements, and their responsibilities all belong to the place.
In a time of longer fire seasons, troubled waters, and uncertainty about what the next season will bring, this teaching asks something difficult and useful of us: pay attention before you speak.
An acknowledgement cannot tell the story of a place if the speaker has stopped noticing it.
The land came first. Beginning there again means learning to name what sustains us, and accepting that what sustains us also asks something of us.
By Rye Karonhiowanen Barberstock
Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash
The post The Land Came First appeared first on Indigenous Climate Hub.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
This guest post is by:
- Dr Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief’s climate science contributor
- Prof Pierre Friedlingstein, chair of mathematical modelling of climate systems at the University of Exeter and part of the Global Carbon Project team.
Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from fossil fuels and cement are projected to fall by around 0.4% in 2026 to 38.2bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2), according to new figures from the Global Carbon Project.
The 21st edition of the annual “global carbon budget” report, published today, says that this small decline is largely due to a 1.9% drop in emissions from oil and the energy shock triggered by the Iran conflict and the closure of the strait of Hormuz.
Emissions from coal continue to increase slightly.
The Global Carbon Project’s projections for fossil fuel and cement CO2 emissions in 2026 are preliminary, with a range that spans a fall of -1.5% to a rise of +0.6%.
This means a small increase in emissions can not be ruled out.
Emissions from land-use change, such as deforestation, are projected to rise in 2026.
This is primarily driven by peat fires and forest degradation in south-east Asia and is linked to the development of a strong El Niño event this year.
As a result, total CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and land use are projected to reach a record high of 43.3GtCO2 in 2026 – marginally above 42.8GtCO2 in 2025.
Research published alongside the report by the same team in Nature Climate Change<