Projects

Efficiency gains along cattle VCs contribute towards increasing profitability and thus attracting more public and private sector interests and investments. This activity will also focus on prioritizing low-carbon VC development with key actors and developing strategies to overcome previously identified barriers to efficiency gains along cattle value chains. Business and investment cases will also be explored under this activity. The activity will focus on ensuring that efficient and more productive VCs contribute towards wealth employment creation for youth, women and other marginalized groups (e.g., indigenous groups) in the target countries. This activity will also will support regional progress towards achieving and stimulating the raising of ambition in emission reduction targets stated in the respective Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) as well as achieving Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 1, 2 and 12.

This activity will focus on organizing platform meetings, training workshops, capacity building sessions and will explore the use of other non-traditional communication tools to effectively communicate science. This activity will also focus on designing and developing a blend of formal (e.g., courses to grad students and GANSO) and informal (e.g., farmer-to-farmer) approaches, to provide support to cattle producers in the target countries. The activity will also focus on fostering an understanding on how to create and strengthen/improve the necessary environments (i.e., incentive structures) and networks (e.g., livestock round-tables), to stimulate practice change on mainly modern (e.g., technophile and social media experienced farmers) large-scale farms without neglecting traditional small- and medium-scale farms who show interest in increasing cattle productivity while reducing GHG emissions.

As part of the project "Heirs of Tradition" along with SENA and Alqueria (a private company of dairy products), a series of workshops and seminars will be carried out in order to develop capacities in the youth to facilitate the generational relief in the livestock sector of Colombia. Such events will be adressed under three programs (productive, environmental and socioeconomic). Key subjects of the workshops include: value chains, gender roles, seed production, forage conservation, species for livestock, carbon footprint and its incorporation to the farm management plan, among others.

In the Orinoquia region exist reliable statistics of adoption of improved forages, in terms of number of hectares planted with certain species. Based on these statistics and on previous studies that have evaluated the potential of several forage germplasm resources to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the soil and/or animal source compared to the traditionally used naturalized or native grasses, we aim to estimate the impact of such improved forages in reducing livestock associated emissions of greenhouse gases at a sub-national scale.

A series of workshops will be held with stakeholders from different countries across all Latin Ameria and the Caribbean to exchange experience in the development of national greenhouse gas inventories. A network of scientists from research centers, NARS, universities and NGOs will be established with the aim to learn methods, models, data, among others towards more specific emission factors for different economic sectors.