CoAct Database

Governors' Climate and Forests Task Force

The Governors’ Climate and Forests (GCF) Task Force is a subnational collaboration of 38 states and provinces working to protect tropical forests, reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and promote realistic pathways to forest-maintaining rural development. They are the world’s largest platform for states and provinces committed to this mission.

The GCF Task Force’s Theory of Change starts from the premise that the key challenges facing efforts to protect forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions at scale are political and legal fragmentation across multiple levels of governance, limited incentives and support for political leaders and civil servants to focus on sustainable forest and land use, and lack of institutional capacity. The COVID-19 pandemic has further compounded and amplified these challenges over the last several years.

In the face of these challenges, bottom-up approaches to protecting forests and reducing greenhouse gas emissions continue to offer important complements to more traditional top down approaches. The Paris agreement recognizes this, and subnational governments are now widely viewed as critical actors in implementing much of the international climate policy agenda. The challenge is to develop institutional frameworks that can motivate, support, connect, and scale these subnational efforts. The GCF Task Force provides one such framework, supporting 45 states and provinces across 11 countries that together hold more than one-third of the world’s tropical forests.

Given its scale, global reach, and multiple points of connection to other processes, the GCF Task Force offers a unique vehicle for advancing jurisdiction-wide approaches to protecting forests, reducing emissions, and enhancing livelihoods across tropical forest states and provinces. The GCF Task Force operates at both political and technical levels: it seeks to harness and support the political leadership of committed Governors in the fight against climate change and deforestation, while empowering the civil servants and their civil society partners that are so critical in the day-to-day effort to build and maintain successful jurisdictional programs. The GCF Task Force links these efforts with existing and emerging pay-for-performance opportunities, aligns them with national policies and programs, and works with public, private sector and community-level partners, including indigenous and traditional leaders. By strengthening and enhancing the multiple, overlapping networks of actors involved in building state and provincial programs for low-emissions development, the GCF Task Force plays a vital role in the broader international effort to protect forests, reduce emissions, and enhance livelihoods.

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