From Kenya’s shrinking lakes to Dutch energy costs, the world’s flower-growing powerhouses confront an uncertain future
The global cut-flower industry, a $100 billion enterprise that delivers blooms from equatorial highlands to urban markets worldwide, is confronting an existential challenge: the very climate conditions that made its dominant growing regions successful are rapidly deteriorating. From East Africa’s drought-stressed rose farms to the Netherlands’ energy-intensive greenhouses, producers across the planet’s flower-growing heartlands are scrambling to adapt as rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and resource competition threaten an industry built on climatic stability.
East Africa: Water Crisis Threatens Kenya’s Rose Dominance
Kenya, the world’s fourth-largest cut flower exporter and supplier of roughly one-third of all roses sold in the European Union, faces its most serious long-term threat not from pests or market competition, but from water. The industry, centered on Lake Naivasha, supports hundreds of thousands of jobs directly and indirectly, drawing heavily from the lake and surrounding aquifers. Recurring East African droughts have intensified competition between flower farms, fishing communities, and food producers who depend on the same diminishing water supply.
Falling lake levels have triggered biodiversity loss and raised concerns about pesticide-related pollution, compounding environmental pressures. Industry analysts now identify secure water access—not land, labor, or logistics—as the single greatest long-term risk to Kenya’s flower sector.
Ethiopia, a newer player supplying roughly 2% of the global cut flower market, faces a similar dynamic. Its floriculture industry has created over 100,000 jobs, predominantly for women, but rests on the same combination of high water demand and climate volatility. Both countries are being pushed toward more efficient irrigation and water recycling to protect an export sector that has become a major source of foreign revenue.
South America: Supply Chain Vulnerability in the Andes
Colombia, the world’s largest cut-flower producer, exports hundreds of millions of stems annually, mostly to the United States. Farms cluster near Bogotá’s international airport to minimize transit time—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.
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 raised concerns about how climate-linked water stress compounds existing labor and environmental issues, from heavy pesticide use to pressures on indigenous and farming communities competing for the same water resources.
Because Colombia and Ecuador dominate North American flower supply, any sustained climate disruption in the Andes has an outsized effect on prices and availability in the U.S. 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: Energy Crisis Replaces Water Scarcity
The Netherlands remains the epicenter of the global flower trade—the world’s largest exporter, home to the dominant auction system, and the re-export hub through which a large share of African flowers reach European consumers. Unlike equatorial competitors, the Dutch industry’s climate challenge is energy, not water.
Because the Netherlands is cold and cloudy for much of the year, greenhouse-based flower production depends on heating and supplemental lighting powered largely by fossil fuels. 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 air freight 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 glazing, and renewable power—changes driven as much by economics as by direct weather disruption.
United Kingdom: Import Dependence Creates Vulnerability
Britain imports the vast majority of its flowers—only around 10% of the roughly £2.2 billion UK cut-flower market is domestically grown—leaving the country heavily exposed to climate disruptions happening elsewhere in the supply chain. A recent Nuffield Farming scholarship report concluded that UK growers have focused almost entirely on cutting their own carbon emissions while giving little attention to building resilience against extreme heat, flooding, and drought domestically.
Climate-related supply chain risk abroad has fed growing interest in home-grown flowers, championed by networks promoting British-grown blooms as a lower-carbon, more resilient alternative—though domestically grown flowers still represent only a small fraction of what’s sold in the UK.
United States and Southern Europe: Drought and Competition
American flower farms, concentrated in California, face worsening drought and water restrictions. The state’s flower industry has contended with the same water scarcity reshaping agriculture across California, raising production costs and limiting output even as demand holds steady. Because the U.S. imports the majority of its cut flowers from Colombia and Ecuador, American consumers are indirectly exposed to climate pressures facing South American growers.
Southern Europe’s ornamental growers, concentrated in some of the continent’s driest regions, are increasingly caught in water-stress dynamics reshaping other water-intensive crops. As droughts become more frequent across southern Spain and Portugal, flower production competes more directly with traditional rain-fed agriculture for an increasingly scarce resource.
A Common Thread: Stability No Longer Guaranteed
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 pressure 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. For consumers, this means higher prices and less predictable availability, particularly around major holidays. For growers, it means investing in resilience—whether through water recycling, renewable energy, or shifting to more climate-appropriate varieties—or watching their competitive advantage wither.