Building Water Resilience in Bogotá and the Region

The páramos, high-Andean forests and wetlands that supply water to Bogotá and 33 surrounding municipalities are degraded, leaving the region exposed to drought. The 2024 to 2025 drought, the most severe in over four decades, brought water rationing for the first time since the 1980s.

The project will demonstrate a Watershed Transformation Model in four priority landscapes. It will conserve and restore high-Andean ecosystems, work with landowners under conservation agreements, and help farms adopt climate-resilient, water-efficient production, with support for producer associations and community-run water systems. It will then use the measured hydrological results to build financing for replication, through a water tariff pathway with Bogotá's water utility and a long-term private financing mechanism managed by Fondo Acción.

Benefits will be measured as hydrological outcomes, giving public and private funders evidence to continue the work after the grant period. Both finance pathways are designed to operate within existing Colombian law, and two companies co-finance a pilot of the private mechanism. Communities will co-design interventions through Watershed Visions and Climate-Resilient Farm Plans, supporting GCF priorities on locally led adaptation.