What happens to an island chain that built a good part of its farming on two tropical crops when temperatures keep climbing? That question runs through a University of La Laguna (ULL) study, published in the journal Environmental Development and reported in early August 2026.
It was led by Juan Carlos Santamarta Cerezal, professor of agricultural and natural environment engineering, with assistant professor Noelia Cruz Pérez. The work belongs to ARSINOE, a European climate adaptation project, and used a “Living Labs” method: three workshops with people from farming, water management, public administration, science and civil society. Not a panel of experts, then, but a table where those who work the land sat with those who set the rules.
The starting point is the link between heat and water availability. The islands lean heavily on tropical monocultures, above all banana and avocado, and their vulnerability to high temperatures could compromise future production. The study gives no figures for how much temperatures have risen or how much land the two crops cover. That is worth saying plainly: this is a direction-setting piece of work, not a numerical audit.
The proposals are specific. More use of reclaimed water, digitised irrigation systems, and training programmes to carry scientific knowledge onto farms. And more diversification: the authors say less concentrated cropping would help biodiversity and shrink the water footprint, although some economic incentives and regulations currently make that harder.
Then comes the less technical part. The recommendations include bringing abandoned farmland back into use, strengthening food sovereignty, teaching sustainable farming from the earliest school years, easing generational renewal, recognising the role of rural women and creating new careers in the primary sector. The authors write that “human factors are as important as technological ones” and that technical fixes alone are not enough.
The project also left behind a tool, the SICMA platform, which won the Chris Binnie Award, and a community of practice among participants that the researchers say could spark new collaborations.
For growers, and for anyone buying local fruit on the islands, the message is less abstract than it sounds. A banana plant cannot move and an avocado tree takes years to bear. Deciding now where reclaimed water goes, which varieties join the mix and who trains the next generation of farmers is deciding what will be harvested in 2050, the horizon the participants chose.
Whether incentives and rules will change fast enough is still open. The study names them as an obstacle, not an answer.
