Tea ( Camellia sinensis L. O. Kuntze) is one of the world’s most widely consumed beverages and a vital cash crop supporting livelihoods, rural economies, and export revenues across the world notably Asia and Africa. It is a critical driver for socio-economic development and improvement of rural livelihoods, directly supporting Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) related to poverty reduction and employment. Enhancing productivity in tea cultivation while ensuring efficient land utilization requires multi-criteria evaluation that integrates soil, climatic, topographic, accessibility, and socio-economic factors. Numerous studies have employed multi-criteria evaluation approaches in land suitability evaluation for tea cultivation, yet divergences in contextual settings, methodologies, data sources, criteria selection, weighting schemes, and suitability classifications have led to inconsistencies in accuracy, reliability, and comparability of results. This systematic review, conducted under the PRISMA framework, critically assesses these variations, harmonizes methodological approaches, and identifies best practices to provide a coherent baseline for future research and application. Findings reveal tea’s high agro-ecological selectivity and most influential factors for tea suitability consistently identified in this study include soil properties, topography, climate, environmental surface and land cover indicators, and accessibility. Highly suitable conditions are defined by moderately acidic pH (4.5–5.5), well-drained, nutrient-rich loamy soils; 1000–2500 m above sea level elevation; 5–20° slope; annual rainfall of 1200–2500 mm; mean annual temperatures of 18–25 °C; relative humidity between 70–80%; areas dominated by forests or existing plantations with NDVI 0.6, and those located within 1 km of roads. Conditions beyond these thresholds fall into moderate or marginal suitability before being deemed unsuitable. Future research should prioritize comparative studies across diverse altitudinal gradients and climatic zones, using different tea varieties, to develop global suitability thresholds for promoting sustainability and resilience under climate change.
Mwesige et al. (Fri,) studied this question.