The Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF) is a unique subnational collaboration between 16 states and provinces from the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, and Peru that seeks to integrate Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and other forest carbon activities into emerging greenhouse gas (GHG) compliance regimes. As such, the GCF represents an important component of the broader effort to mobilize and advance financing for REDD activities on a pay-for-performance basis; to provide recommendations for the legal and regulatory design of GHG compliance markets to recognize REDD activities; to build capacity for such activities in subnational jurisdictions in tropical forest countries; and to develop institutions and programs for linking subnational REDD activities with ongoing national and international efforts.

The overarching rationale upon which the GCF is premised holds that any successful effort to address the deforestation component of climate change by bringing REDD into climate policy requires multiple efforts at multiple levels of governance. The GCF was therefore conceived as an effort to leverage the fact that certain states and provinces around the world are in a position to be early movers to bring REDD into climate policy, thereby bolstering overall momentum for the issue and enhancing national and international efforts to demonstrate how REDD can work in practice.