Prioritizing climate-smart cattle farming practices and technologies for sustainable livestock production in Colombia’s Orinoquia region

The Orinoquia region in Colombia is home to diverse ecosystems, including forests and various agroecological zones, but extensive cattle ranching poses a significant challenge as it contributes to deforestation and threatens the region's valuable forest resources. To address this issue, there is a growing interest in promoting low-carbon land use and practices that increase adaptation and resilience to climate change. Climate-smart cattle farming (CSCF) integrates adaptation, resilience, and mitigation strategies to ensure sustainable and profitable productivity. This study aimed to identify, evaluate, and prioritise CSCF practices and technologies for the Orinoquia region in Colombia in a participatory manner. The framework developed for the study involved a first phase of identification and evaluation of CSCF practices and technologies based on evidence from the literature, followed by a second phase of classification and prioritisation of practices through participatory processes with key stakeholders in the region. CSCF practices were evaluated and ranked by five pillars: productivity, mitigation, adaptation, economic feasibility, and ease of implementation (perception pillar). Indicators analysed included animal stocking rate, weight gain, duration of practice evidence, enteric methane emission intensity, soil carbon stock, establishment costs, and forage production in high and low precipitation seasons, ease of implementation, and level of interest in the practice by the producers. The study found that intensive silvopastoral systems for browsing, improved pastures plus rotational grazing, and grazing management practices represented the CSCF options with the greatest productive, environmental, and economic benefits. These practices can help promote a productive, profitable, and climate-adapted livestock sector in the region. The participatory approach used in the study can also facilitate alignment between sectors and policies and help develop farmers' capacities and knowledge to make climate-smart choices in their livestock production systems. In conclusion, promoting climate-smart cattle farming practices is crucial for ensuring sustainable and profitable productivity in the Orinoquia region of Colombia. The participatory approach used in this study can help identify, evaluate, and prioritise CSCF practices and technologies that are productive, profitable, low-carbon and climate-adapted

Making climate finance work in agriculture

This discussion paper was produced as a background documentfor the 2016 FAO State of Food and Agriculture (SOFA) report. It was produced through desk research and analysis of existing agricultural and climate finance literature. Moreover, qualitative interviews with key experts representing different stakeholder groups in the agriculture, climate, and financial sectors were conducted to inform the potential opportunities and innovations that should be further explored to make climate finance work for agriculture. Finally, a collection of supporting case studies were provided by different stakeholders to showcase some of the most successful and innovative examples already being implemented in the climate finance community.It is important to note that this is a discussion paper that aims to explore the intersection between climate and agriculture finance by generating dialogue. Hence, the paper explores a relatively new field and proposes innovative interventions that either are being tested or could be tested to increase the leverage of private capital and strengthen the links between financial institutions on the one hand and smallholder farmers and SMEs on the other. The objective of the paper is to generate discussion around this topic and, therefore, no blanket recommendations or descriptive interventions are proposed. A growing population and changing diets are driving up the demand for food. Production is struggling to keep up as crop yields level off in many parts of the world, ocean health declines, and natural resources— including soils, water and biodiversity—are stretched dangerously thin. Climate change is critically interrelated with agriculture. On the one hand, agriculture is extremely vulnerable to climate change. This paper proposes three different avenues to use climate finance to achieve this goal: a) Designing and adapting innovative mechanisms to leverage additional sources of capital, from both public and private sources, that can be directed towards climate smartinvestments in the agriculture sector. b) Identifying entry points for directing climate finance into agriculture and for linking FIs to smallholders and agricultural SMEs, including through capacity building and technical assistance. c) Providing technical assistance to increase investments in agriculture. Finally, this paper presents several suggestions to contribute to the achievement of the ideas presented in this paper, including the need for increased knowledge on innovative financial instruments and mechanisms, bridging information gaps, identifying opportunities, promoting dialogue and cooperation, and designing an action plan to move this agenda forward