Future prospects for Jatropha curcas L. as a bioenergy crop: Assessing land suitability under varying climate scenarios

Abstract

Intensifying greenhouse-gas emissions from prolonged reliance on conventional energy and the resulting climate change have amplified the need for scalable bioenergy solutions; within this context, Jatropha curcas L. is a promising second-generation biodiesel crop. This study aims to delineate current and future land suitability for Jatropha curcas L. cultivation to inform sustainable energy transitions. We integrated georeferenced occurrence records with climate, topographic, and soil covariates on a 0.05° global grid and applied a GIS-based Boosted Regression Trees framework (10-fold cross-validation; 50 simulations) to map suitability under baseline conditions and RCP4.5/6.0/8.5 scenarios. Temperature variables dominated model performance (85.51 % total contribution), led by Temperature Seasonality (65.45 %, 95 % CI: 59.39–71.50 %). As of 2020, an estimated 37.6421 million km² are suitable for Jatropha curcas L. cultivation, >80 % in Africa and South America, and this broad distribution persists across scenarios. Projections indicate that by 2080, highly suitable areas increase by 278.23–333.19 km²; moreover, the spatial regions where suitability increases or decreases are broadly consistent across all three RCPs, indicating that climate-driven changes in suitability are concentrating in specific regions. The decade 2020–2030 emerges as the most dynamic period, with marked expansion in central Africa and northern coastal Australia and contraction along the southern coasts of North America, southern Africa, and parts of South Asia, followed by slower net change thereafter (notably under RCP6.0). These findings underscore the potential of Jatropha curcas L. to contribute to low-carbon energy systems and highlight the need for targeted agricultural management and infrastructure planning in regions where changes in suitability are concentrated.