Colombia’s extraordinary biodiversity sits in stark contradiction with a land use sector that generates over half of national emissions. The country allocates about 1.1% of its GDP to agricultural subsidies, one of the largest budgets in the region, but historically these investments have not delivered the growth or sustainability outcomes the country needs. At the same time, Colombia has made bold upstream commitments: a 51% emissions reduction by 2030 under its NDC, carbon neutrality by 2050, and 34% conservation of terrestrial and marine-coastal areas under its biodiversity targets. The question is whether these ambitions are being matched by the fiscal policies that would actually deliver them.
A recent case study from the UN Development Account (UNDA) project “Financing NbS for a Green and Inclusive Recovery in Latin America” tracked whether green agricultural spending is keeping pace with those commitments, and found it is not. Building on a scoping study that provided an overview of the country’s fiscal policies, the analysis used Colombia’s Climate MRV system as a proxy to track nature-positive agriculture spending from 2011 to 2023. Results show that green agricultural investment rose from about 1.81% to only 2.37% of total agricultural public spending over this period. In other words, the ambition embedded in Colombia’s upstream climate and nature policies is not being fully translated at the downstream level, where budgets are actually allocated and spent.
Worse, the green spending that does exist is not flowing where environmental pressure is highest. The study mapped green investment against municipal-level indicators of environmental pressure (deforestation, soil erosion, water stress, and climate risk) and found persistent mismatches. A continuous belt of high-deforestation, low-investment municipalities stretches along the Andean–Amazon foothills, while productive corridors in the interior and the Caribbean also show significant deficits. By 2023, green agricultural projects had reached just under 42% of the country’s municipalities, and within those, resources were often concentrated in a handful of localities.
The study demonstrates that green investments can match or outperform their conventional counterparts. Using a difference-in-differences approach, the analysis classified over 48,000 public procurement contracts as either “green” or “traditional” and compared their effects on agricultural yields, production, and harvested area across municipalities. The result shows there is no evidence that sustainable investments underperform conventional ones. In the short term, green contracts perform on par with traditional support across all key indicators. In the long term, several specifications suggest that green contracts actually outperform their conventional counterparts, particularly when they involve the direct provision of sustainable inputs such as biofertilizers, improved seeds, or agroforestry materials.
The implications extend well beyond Colombia. The persistent assumption that sustainability must come at the cost of productivity has long served as a barrier to fiscal reform in agriculture across the world. The evidence from Colombia suggests this trade-off is not inevitable, and that the real risk lies in continuing to allocate most public resources to approaches that neither protect ecosystems nor deliver sound economic returns. Thus, for countries with ambitious upstream climate and biodiversity commitments but limited downstream implementation, the path forward is to scale up green agricultural investments, concentrate them in the territories where environmental pressures are highest and the development gains from a transition are greatest. Doing so is not only environmentally necessary but economically sound, and the longer governments delay, the more entrenched the inefficiencies of conventional support become.
About the authors
Thomas Loussouarn, Intern at the United Nations Environment Program, Economic and Fiscal Policy Unit
Minhyuk Hong, Associate Expert at the United Nations Environment Program, Economic and Fiscal Policy Unit
