In a new report released last month, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP)’s Climate Promise highlighted key successes in advancing successful actions to protect forests and communities in Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCFTF) jurisdictions. The report, titled “Subnational Success: Lessons from Tropical Forest Jurisdictions” assessed results of a $24 million pledge from the Government of Norway to the GCFTF made in 2015. Those funds, administered by UNDP in partnership with the GCFTF, supported jurisdictions in developing state and provincial-wide strategies to attract investment to support efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation and to embed those strategies into broader development frameworks. The findings of the report demonstrate that “with the right conditions in place, targeted funding for initiatives at a subnational level can have an outsized impact.”
The UNDP, in a short statement, noted that:
“When it comes to climate action, initiatives to support subnational governments have received far less attention than those at the national level. Yet the subnational level is where decisions on forests and land use are often made and at a scale closer to the communities that live in and depend on forests, particularly Indigenous Peoples. When done well, actions at this level can have significant impact on the ground. Subnational governments can incubate and innovate, testing new ideas to address the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation. Subnational actions (and eventual emissions reductions) can feed into a national-level process that ultimately contributes to national climate targets, including Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).”
Key findings include:
- Donors must provide strategic investment into the low emissions development programs of subnational jurisdictions. This investment needs to be long-term, realistic, diverse enough to fund multiple interventions, agile and responsive to state needs, and based on best practice and lessons learned.
- The model of state-NGO collaboration piloted in the 35 tropical forest jurisdictions under the Norway Pledge should be replicated in future interventions, with attention to the success factors that led to lasting, mutually beneficial relationships.
- Strong links to national REDD+/low emissions development processes and support from higher-capacity national partners (government and non-governmental) are critical.
- Administrative turnover is a regular occurrence at the jurisdictional level, so it is critical that new governors and administrations are targeted with strategic investment to ensure gains made by their predecessors are sustained. Between 2023 and 2024, nearly half the GCFTF jurisdictions changed leaders: 20 new governors were elected, bringing in new jurisdictional leadership at the highest level as well as their leading political appointees (Secretaries of the Environment, for example).
- The work of the GCFTF Secretariat and Country Directors was critical to reinforce and enrich the work of jurisdictions as was the support from UNDP, in particular through the country-level coordination to share knowledge, leverage political support, connect with national actors, and coordinate jurisdictions to act collectively.
- The GCFTF Secretariat and Country Directors require sustained long-term financing to maintain and expand the unique work of the network.
- The GCFTF network should be targeted for new research on the quantitative and qualitative impacts of jurisdictional REDD+ (JREDD) and the jurisdictional approach, with dissemination of results to raise awareness of success stories and to leverage finance to maintain subnational actions.
Additional reporting on this important step in assessing the successes, impacts, and ongoing necessity of the GCFTF network is available here.