Abstract

Climate Change in the Subtropics: The Impacts on Banana Productivity
Track: Sustainable Development and Humanitarian Affairs
Authors: Glenn Hyman, David Brown

The potential for bananas to produce year round is best expressed when water is abundant and daily temperatures are in the range of 20-30°C. Zones with these conditions produce fruit for the global market. However, banana production, mainly for national markets, has developed in many subtropical areas under less than optimum conditions. In these regions, bananas are subject to sub-optimum temperatures and short days. The effects of climate change on selected subtropical production areas were modeled in a two-step procedure using the EcoCrop model, under current growing conditions and for 2020 and 2050 using a set of 19 IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Global Climate Models (GCMs) under the SRES-A2 (business as usual) emission scenario. The modeling showed that current suitability for banana production in the subtropics is much lower than in the tropics with great variation in suitability within the subtropics.