With the generous 2009 and 2010 support of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, and ClimateWorks Foundation, Professor William Boyd and Colorado Law’s Center for Energy & Environmental Security’s Research Fellow Julie Teel are implementing the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force (GCF) as its Senior Advisor/Project Lead and Project Manager. GCF member states singled out Professor Boyd for this effort because of his experience and track record working on the integration of forests and land use into climate policy at multiple scales. The GCF is a unique subnational collaboration between 14 states and provinces from the United States, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Mexico that seeks to integrate Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) and other forest carbon activities into emerging greenhouse gas (GHG) compliance regimes in the United States and elsewhere and into climate policy and action more broadly. The GCF grew out of 2008 Memoranda of Understanding signed at the first Governors’ Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles, California, between Governor Schwarzenegger and governors from four Brazilian Amazon states and two Indonesian provinces that encompass a substantial amount of the world’s remaining tropical forests.The GCF premise is that any successful effort to bring REDD into climate policy requires multiple efforts at multiple levels of governance. Certain key states and provinces around the world are in a position to be early movers on the effort 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.“Put another way,” summarizes Professor Boyd, “the GCF represents an effort to move into what might be called the proof-of-concept stage for REDD.”The GCF is creating a common understanding of the key substantive and procedural elements of robust REDD programs, facilitating the development of interoperable REDD programs in the GCF states and provinces, and attracting financing and other support for capacity-building and REDD activities in the GCF states and provinces.In 2010, Professor Boyd and Teel (with the GCF members states, stakeholders, and other partners), continue to implement the GCF’s Joint Action Plan. They convened a Technical Workshop on REDD Regulatory Design to develop REDD regulatory design recommendations for California’s Cap-and-Trade Program. They also organized, facilitated, and developed substantive materials for the GCF’s meeting in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.They are now further developing recommendations for subnational REDD frameworks, which will be on the agenda of the next GCF meeting in Santarém, Brazil (September 13-17, 2010) and a focal point of the GCF’s activities at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Cancun, Mexico (December 2010).