Flowers are grown almost everywhere, but the global cut-flower trade is concentrated in a handful of regions, each valued for a particular climate advantage — East Africa’s high-altitude sunshine, South America’s equatorial stability, the Netherlands’ auction infrastructure and greenhouse expertise. Climate change is now testing the very conditions that made each of these regions a flower-growing power in the first place. Here’s how it’s playing out, region by region.
East Africa: Kenya and Ethiopia
Kenya is the world’s fourth-largest cut flower exporter and supplies roughly a third of all roses sold in the European Union, an industry that supports hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly. Almost all of it centers on Lake Naivasha, whose high altitude, strong sunshine, and abundant water made it ideal for year-round rose production.
That water supply is now the industry’s central vulnerability. The floriculture sector draws heavily from the lake and surrounding aquifers, and recurring East African droughts have intensified competition between flower farms, fishing communities, and food farmers who depend on the same limited water. Falling lake levels have also been linked to biodiversity loss and pesticide-related pollution concerns, adding environmental pressure on top of the water-scarcity issue. Industry analysts increasingly describe secure water access — not land, labor, or export logistics — as the single biggest long-term risk to Kenya’s flower sector.
Ethiopia, a newer but fast-growing player supplying roughly 2% of the global cut flower market, faces a similar dynamic. Its floriculture industry has created well over 100,000 jobs, mostly for women, but rests on the same combination of high water demand and climate volatility that threatens Kenyan producers. Both countries are being pushed toward more efficient irrigation and water recycling simply to protect an export sector that has become a major source of foreign revenue.
South America: Colombia and Ecuador
Colombia is the single largest cut-flower producer in the world, exporting hundreds of millions of stems annually, mostly to the United States. Its farms cluster near Bogotá’s international airport to minimize the time between harvest and air freight — flowers can lose roughly 15% of their value for every extra day in transit, making the supply chain acutely sensitive to any weather-related disruption to harvesting or shipping schedules.
Ecuador has built its reputation on large, high-altitude roses grown in industrial greenhouses. Rose cultivation there is highly water- and chemical-intensive, and shifting rainfall patterns are adding new strain to a system already under scrutiny for its water use. Reporting on Ecuador’s flower regions has also raised concerns about how climate-linked water stress compounds existing labor and environmental issues in the industry, from heavy pesticide use to the pressures placed on nearby indigenous and farming communities competing for the same water resources.
Because Colombia and Ecuador dominate the flower supply to North America the way Kenya and the Netherlands dominate Europe, any sustained climate disruption in the Andes has an outsized effect on flower prices and availability in the US market, particularly around high-demand periods like Valentine’s Day and Mother’s Day, when supply chains already run with almost no slack.
The Netherlands
The Netherlands is the epicenter of the global flower trade — the world’s largest exporter, home to the dominant flower auction system, and the re-export hub through which a large share of Kenyan and other African flowers reach European consumers. Unlike its equatorial competitors, the Dutch industry’s climate challenge isn’t water scarcity but energy.
Because the Netherlands’ climate is cold and cloudy for much of the year, its greenhouse-based flower production depends on heating and supplemental lighting powered largely by fossil fuels. That makes Dutch-grown flowers surprisingly carbon-intensive — studies have found roses grown in Dutch greenhouses can generate several times the emissions of the same rose grown outdoors in Kenya, even after accounting for the flight from Nairobi to Amsterdam. As climate policy and energy costs increasingly bear down on greenhouse heating, Dutch growers are investing in geothermal energy, more efficient greenhouse glazing, and renewable power to keep their production model viable — changes driven as much by economics as by direct weather disruption.
The United Kingdom
Britain imports the vast majority of its flowers — only around 10% of the roughly £2.2 billion UK cut-flower market is domestically grown — which leaves the country heavily exposed to climate disruptions happening elsewhere in the supply chain, from Kenya to the Netherlands. A recent Nuffield Farming scholarship report on the British industry, based on research trips to Kenya, the Netherlands, and New Zealand, concluded that UK growers have focused almost entirely on cutting their own carbon emissions while giving little attention to building resilience against the extreme heat, flooding, and drought a warming climate will bring domestically.
At the same time, climate-related supply chain risk abroad has fed growing interest in home-grown flowers, championed by grower networks promoting British-grown blooms as a lower-carbon, more resilient alternative to imports — though domestically grown flowers still represent only a small fraction of what’s sold in the UK.
The United States
American flower farms, concentrated in states like California, face their own climate pressures, particularly worsening drought and water restrictions in key growing areas. California’s flower industry — historically one of the country’s largest — has had to contend with the same water scarcity issues reshaping agriculture across the state more broadly, raising production costs and limiting how much can be grown even as demand holds steady.
Because the US imports the large majority of its cut flowers, mostly from Colombia and Ecuador, American consumers are also indirectly exposed to the climate pressures facing South American growers. Domestic flower farming — often smaller-scale and direct-to-consumer — has seen a modest resurgence partly framed around reducing exposure to that long, climate-vulnerable import supply chain, alongside interest in seasonal, locally grown blooms.
Southern Europe: Spain and the Wider Mediterranean
Southern Europe’s ornamental and horticultural growers, concentrated in some of the continent’s driest regions, are increasingly caught in the same water-stress dynamics reshaping other water-intensive crops in the area, including berries grown under plastic greenhouses across the Iberian Peninsula. As droughts become more frequent across southern Spain and Portugal, water-intensive flower and ornamental plant production is competing more directly with traditional rain-fed agriculture for an increasingly scarce resource.
A Common Thread
Despite their different climates, economies, and crops, flower-growing regions worldwide are converging on the same set of pressures: water scarcity, unpredictable growing seasons, rising pest and disease pressure, and the high cost of protecting a highly perishable, low-margin product against increasingly volatile weather. What differs by region is which of those pressures dominates — water in East Africa and the Andes, energy in the Netherlands, drought in California and southern Europe — but the underlying story is the same. An industry built around exploiting stable, predictable climates is having to adapt to a world where that stability can no longer be taken for granted.