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Societal Impact Statement: Bananas are the world's most popular dessert fruit and a staple starch crop for millions in low‐ and middle‐income countries. The banana export trade that supplies North America, Europe, and other wealthy nations has a history fraught with exploitation and conflict. The price of cheap bananas has been environmental degradation, violence, and poverty. Only recently have efforts to address the power imbalances in this trade been made. Voluntary certification schemes aim to address multiple sustainability issues, while research into biological control, accelerated plant breeding, and efficient irrigation will help prepare the industry for emerging threats from pests, diseases, and climate change. Summary: Bananas are the world's favorite dessert fruit, a staple starch crop for millions, and an important source of income for producers across the tropics and subtropics. Bananas evolved and diversified as giant perennial herbs of open habitats within the humid forests of Southeast Asia and West Oceania and were domesticated around 7000 years BP through a series of hybridization events. This review considers the journey from rainforest riversides to intensively managed monoculture plantations, focussing on the Cavendish banana that comprises nearly the entire global export trade. Climate change increasingly threatens economic sustainability in several major producer regions, requiring responses such as efficient irrigation systems to maintain productivity and water security. Pests and diseases are spreading globally and have severe direct impacts on production as well as indirect impacts via harm to ecological and human health caused by pesticides. New pest and disease management methods employing biological controls and enhancing soil health and new plant breeding techniques must be developed and implemented. The banana production and trade system has been characterized by power imbalances between international firms that own plantations and supply the market and the local agricultural workers who cultivate and harvest the fruit. Voluntary certification schemes have been developed to address the numerous environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues faced by the industry. There are indications, from research on biological disease control to new deals on wages and benefits for banana workers, that change is slowly coming to the global banana trade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policymakers and businesses in Southeast Asia are increasingly interested in using carbon markets to encourage adoption of regenerative agriculture practices by farmers. These practices are thought to mitigate climate change by reducing soil carbon loss and enhancing soil carbon sequestration. However, there is uncertainty in the ability of regenerative agriculture practices to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks of croplands. We reviewed 92 empirical studies that investigated the effects of 17 regenerative farming practices across 11 broad categories of crops on SOC stock or content in Southeast Asia. Our synthesis found supporting evidence for the use of organic amendments like biochar, compost, and manure, as well as cover cropping, crop rotation, and conservation tillage to increase SOC. However, studies for practices like addition of compost and manure reported increases in greenhouse gas emissions like methane (CH 4) and nitrous oxide (N 2 O), demonstrating that increases in SOC may be offset by increases in greenhouse gas emissions. Only a few studies measured both the changes in SOC stocks and greenhouse gas emissions and none of the studies completed full greenhouse gas inventories. Estimating the net impact of SOC gains and increase of greenhouse gas emissions will be necessary to understand the overall effect of practices like compost, manure and crop residue incorporation on net atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations. If these practices are implemented for soil carbon projects, practitioners should anticipate increases in greenhouse gas emissions from soils and implement additional practices, such as alternate wetting and drying, to optimize the climate change mitigation effects of regenerative agriculture. We encourage future research on practices, such as agroforestry and changes in crop residue management, where there are few studies and little variation in experimental design and environmental conditions. Given the interest in scaling up regenerative agriculture through voluntary carbon markets to boost SOC stocks in croplands, policymakers and businesses can support research in this area by making field-collected data from their projects accessible to researchers to further the study of the impact of these practices across different abiotic conditions and soil managements. This data sharing would alleviate the paucity and improve the quality of empirical data on regenerative agricultural practices in Southeast Asian croplands, facilitate practice-specific meta-analyses, and help to optimize climate change mitigation effects of regenerative agriculture. • Regenerative agriculture practices can increase soil carbon in Southeast Asia. • These practices can also increase cropland greenhouse gas emissions like methane. • More empirical data is needed to quantify the practices' effects on soil carbon [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]