Computer modeling puts a new species on the menu of edible fire breaks.

By Madeline Bodin

A team of scientists says it has found a plant that could help protect communities against wildfire while providing income and filling bellies at the same time: the banana.

A new study, recently published in the science journal PNAS Nexus, used complex computer modeling to show that in Southern California, raising bananas in fields at least 2,000 feet wide could both slow fire within the wildland–urban interface (WUI) and potentially be profitable. It’s a finding that could be applied to other U.S. locations, including Hawaiʻi, where wildfires largely destroyed the town of Lahaina last year. A computer simulation showed that a banana buffer of that size would have slowed California’s 2017 Tubbs Fire by more than five hours, long enough for firefighters to intervene.

“It turns out that this plant you would think is a specialist can do more things than we thought,” says one of the researchers, Michael Kantar, an associate professor in the tropical plant and soil sciences department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Not only do banana plants retain a lot of moisture (even their dead leaves are moist relative to other plants), making the plant an effective fire break, but a banana buffer with an average yield could produce fruit sale profits of $56,000 per hectare (or $22,663 per acre), according to the study. “It’s fun when science provides new answers,” Kantar says.

The banana is not the first food crop suggested as a potential fire break. Vineyards have acted as unplanned fire breaks during certain California fires, such as 2017’s Atlas Fire. Avocado fields have filled that role in other fires. Succulents such as agave and cacti are popular choices as edible fire buffers because of their low water use.

Kantar says the researchers also tested figs, carob, perennial peanut, and sweet potatoes as potential fire buffer plants but were able to proceed farthest and fastest with research into bananas. Edible fire breaks have other benefits, too. Fire maintenance is expensive, and cropland such as a banana field could potentially pay its own way. “We can’t afford land that only fills one need,” says Jonah Susskind, a California-based senior research associate with SWA’s XL Lab. “Fire breaks that are not just open space but provide food and income are an important part of the land-use mix.”

Douglas Kent, the author of the book Firescaping: Protecting Your Home with a Fire-Resistant Landscape who teaches land management courses at three California universities, says that maintenance plays an important role in whether a plant or landscaped area will withstand fire. Communities may be more willing to alter croplands through pruning, thinning, or prescribed fire than they may be to manage wildlands or parklands, he says.

Similarly, Susskind says that there is a “glaring knowledge gap” about reducing fire risks at the community level compared to techniques known for households or over large landscapes, an observation that informed SWA’s 2023 publication Playbook for the Pyrocene: Design Strategies for Fire-Prone Communities. Susskind says he appreciates that Kantar and his coauthors chose that spatial frame.

“Fire breaks that are not just open space but provide food and income are an important part of the land-use mix.”

—Jonah Susskind

While Kantar’s study focuses on fire-prone Southern California as the potential beneficiary of banana fire buffers, in the paper, the researchers point out that the benefits of growing bananas are not limited to the country’s warmest zones, especially as climate change expands the ranges of various banana species. “We need to think about where plants might grow in the future,” Susskind says.

One practical challenge to implementation could be a lack of infrastructure for banana cultivation in the United States, which grows a fraction of the world’s bananas, mostly in Hawaiʻi and Florida. But Kantar says the team’s primary aim was to find new ways to think about land use at a time when owners want to get more out of their landscapes. What they didn’t know, he says, is that the answer would be bananas.