Abstract
The Orinoquia region of eastern Colombia (comprising Meta, Arauca, Casanare, and Vichada) is one of the country’s most important livestock frontiers and a landscape of high ecological value, characterized by savannas, wetlands, riparian forests, and floodplains that provide essential ecosystem services. While cattle ranching remains central to rural livelihoods, employment, income generation, and food security, continued agricultural expansion and climate variability pose increasing risks to the sustainability of livestock systems. Extensive production practices, pasture degradation, limited tree integration, and growing exposure to droughts and floods threaten both ecosystem resilience and the long-term viability of livestock-based livelihoods.
Within this context, the Orinoquia Climate-Smart Livestock and Climate Project (OGSC) was implemented as part of the World Bank and BioCarbon Fund–ISFL agenda, in partnership with FEDEGAN, CIPAV, CIAT, and Universidad EAFIT. The project aimed to evaluate whether structured rural advisory services could support a transition from extensive livestock production toward climate-smart livestock systems. The intervention was grounded in the premise that adoption of climate-smart practices depends not only on information provision, but also on participatory learning, experimentation, repeated reinforcement, and producers’ perceptions of feasibility, risk, costs, and expected benefits.
The OGSC intervention delivered a Rural Advisory model over a 12-month period, combining collective learning spaces (such as participatory planning, technical workshops, field days, and group discussions) with individualized on-farm advisory visits. Demonstration farms and producer-to-producer learning mechanisms were used to reduce perceived adoption risks and provide visible local evidence of practice feasibility. The advisory strategy prioritized management-based and incrementally adoptable practices with potential co-benefits for productivity, pasture condition, tree cover, water protection, forage availability, conservation, and farm-level decision-making.
To generate credible evidence, the project used a counterfactual evaluation design with treatment and control groups, drawing on 2,133 observations that combine baseline and endline measurements from more than 1,000 livestock producers. This design allowed the analysis to distinguish changes attributable to the intervention from broader regional trends. The empirical findings show that OGSC generated meaningful increases in the adoption of climate-smart livestock practices, particularly those related to pasture–tree integration, live fences, forage management, conservation-oriented behaviors, and managerial capacity.
The results indicate that treatment farms were more likely to increase tree cover in grazing areas, with estimated effects of approximately 7.4 percentage points in the most complete model specification. They also showed a substantial increase in live fence adoption, with effects of approximately 12.7 percentage points. These practices contribute to improved microclimatic conditions, biodiversity, landscape connectivity, and ecosystem service provision while maintaining productive capacity. The intervention also improved producers’ capacity to manage forage scarcity: treatment farms were more likely to establish forage banks, with an estimated effect of 7.4 percentage points, and those with forage banks were more likely to report that these effectively covered feed requirements during scarcity periods, with an estimated effect of 8.1 percentage points.
Beyond specific production and conservation practices, OGSC strengthened managerial resilience. Among producers who kept farm records, those in the treatment group were more likely to analyze this information and use it for decision-making, with an estimated effect of 4.8 percentage points. The project also increased the likelihood of allocating specific farm areas to conservation by approximately 5.1 percentage points, reinforcing the environmental co-benefits of climate-smart livestock systems. However, effects on credit access and credit approval were limited or statistically insignificant, suggesting that advisory services alone may be insufficient to overcome structural barriers related to finance, market access, and institutional support.
Overall, the findings demonstrate that well-designed rural advisory systems can play a central role in shifting extensive livestock landscapes toward climate-smart trajectories, especially when they combine peer learning, individualized technical support, demonstration-based evidence, and continuous monitoring. The results also suggest that low-cost, management-based practices are particularly responsive to advisory-driven behavior change, making them strategic entry points for scaling. Sustaining and expanding these gains will require deeper analysis of heterogeneity across departments and production systems, continued follow-up, and stronger linkages between advisory services and enabling conditions such as finance, institutional support, and market incentives. In this sense, OGSC provides practical and evidence-based lessons for advancing productivity, climate resilience, and environmental sustainability in one of Colombia’s most important cattle-ranching regions