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
Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes
Greenhouse Gases
DeBriefed 6 March 2026: Iran energy crisis | China climate plan | Bristol’s ‘pioneering’ wind turbine
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Energy crisis
ENERGY SPIKE: US-Israeli attacks on Iran and subsequent counterattacks across the Middle East have sent energy prices “soaring”, according to Reuters. The newswire reported that the region “accounts for just under a third of global oil production and almost a fifth of gas”. The Guardian noted that shipping traffic through the strait of Hormuz, which normally ferries 20% of the world’s oil, “all but ground to a halt”. The Financial Times reported that attacks by Iran on Middle East energy facilities – notably in Qatar – triggered the “biggest rise in gas prices since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine”.
‘RISK’ AND ‘BENEFITS’: Bloomberg reported on increases in diesel prices in Europe and the US, speculating that rising fuel costs could be “a risk for president Donald Trump”. US gas producers are “poised to benefit from the big disruption in global supply”, according to CNBC. Indian government sources told the Economic Times that Russia is prepared to “fulfil India’s energy demands”. China Daily quoted experts who said “China’s energy security remains fundamentally unshaken”, thanks to “emergency stockpiles and a wide array of import channels”.
‘ESSENTIAL’ RENEWABLES: Energy analysts said governments should cut their fossil-fuel reliance by investing in renewables, “rather than just seeking non-Gulf oil and gas suppliers”, reported Climate Home News. This message was echoed by UK business secretary Peter Kyle, who said “doubling down on renewables” was “essential” amid “regional instability”, according to the Daily Telegraph.
China’s climate plan
PEAK COAL?: China has set out its next “five-year plan” at the annual “two sessions” meeting of the National People’s Congress, including its climate strategy out to 2030, according to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post. The plan called for China to cut its carbon emissions per unit of gross domestic product (GDP) by 17% from 2026 to 2030, which “may allow for continued increase in emissions given the rate of GDP growth”, reported Reuters. The newswire added that the plan also had targets to reach peak coal in the next five years and replace 30m tonnes per year of coal with renewables.
ACTIVE YET PRUDENT: Bloomberg described the new plan as “cautious”, stating that it “frustrat[es] hopes for tighter policy that would drive the nation to peak carbon emissions well before president Xi Jinping’s 2030 deadline”. Carbon Brief has just published an in-depth analysis of the plan. China Daily reported that the strategy “highlights measures to promote the climate targets of peaking carbon dioxide emissions before 2030”, which China said it would work towards “actively yet prudently”.
Around the world
- EU RULES: The European Commission has proposed new “made in Europe” rules to support domestic low-carbon industries, “against fierce competition from China”, reported Agence France-Presse. Carbon Brief examined what it means for climate efforts.
- RECORD HEAT: The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said there is a 50-60% chance that the El Niño weather pattern could return this year, amplifying the effect of global warming and potentially driving temperatures to “record highs”, according to Euronews.
- FLAGSHIP FUND: The African Development Bank’s “flagship clean energy fund” plans to more than double its financing to $2.5bn for African renewables over the next two years, reported the Associated Press.
- NO WITHDRAWAL: Vanuatu has defied US efforts to force the Pacific-island nation to drop a UN draft resolution calling on the world to implement a landmark International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruling on climate, according to the Guardian.
98
The number of nations that submitted their national reports on tackling nature loss to the UN on time – just half of the 196 countries that are part of the UN biodiversity treaty – according to analysis by