It was last May, William Boyd was in Rio Branco, Brazil, attending the 15th annual meeting of the international Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force, which he heads. Boyd, a UCLA environmental law professor, was on stage, watching and listening, as Marina Silva, Brazil’s environmental minister, pledged to work with governors from states and provinces around the world that are home to tropical rainforests.
Many of the state leaders from Brazil were from rival political parties. But they applauded, shook hands and embraced Silva.
I was there, tagging along on Boyd’s visit to Brazil. He told me this was “a moment of cooperation, goodwill and commitment to work together between the federal government and the states, and that has not always been the case in Brazil.”
It was this meeting that made him think of Arnold Schwarzenegger, the body builder and movie actor who transformed into a Republican politician and was elected governor of California. Seventeen years before, while he was governor, Schwarzenegger founded the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force. “It grew out of California’s deep commitment to subnational action and leadership on climate change,” Boyd said, “which 100% came from Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, because he deliberately made this a priority of his administration, convened the first global climate summit in Los Angeles in 2008 and pulled in governors from Brazil and Indonesia.”
This alliance of governors has grown exponentially. It now includes 45 states or jurisdictions — encompassing all of the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon as well as 60% of the forests of Mexico and Indonesia and 75% of the Bolivian Amazon.
These tropical forests are one of the most underappreciated solutions to Earth’s climate crisis. Forests keep the planet cool, like a thermostat, by storing carbon dioxide that would otherwise be heating the atmosphere. Preserving the forests protects this important “carbon sink.”
But our planet is dangerously close to losing this thermostat. Last year, the tropics lost 6.7 hectares of forest — a loss equivalent to 18 football fields a minute — according to researchers at the World Resources Institute. “We’re going to have real problems meeting our climate commitments,” Boyd said, “if we don’t think long and hard about how to protect, restore and make more resilient the forests that we have.”
All of this makes the work of the GCF Task Force more important than ever. Its meetings encourage states to find partners and financing for environmental preservation at a time when national governments struggle to agree on anything. The task force convenes technical exchanges for environmental agency employees to connect, access training and share best practices for protecting forest land from illegal logging. One training in 2023 brought civil servants from around the world to UCLA’s campus to learn how to use satellite imagery and remote sensing technology to detect clear-cutting of trees in real time.
Those meetings also help to inoculate environmental agencies from upheavals produced by inevitable changes of political administrations — and disruptions like the one caused by the second Trump administration’s remaking of the federal workforce.
In November, the annual United Nations climate conference will descend upon the small Brazilian rainforest city of Belém — the first time this summit has been held in the Amazon. The United States will be missing because it has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement, adopted by more than 190 parties at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in 2015. The goal of the agreement is to hold “the increase in the global average temperature to well below two degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels.”
But states that comprise the GCF Task Force will be there — California included — and Brazilian members will find themselves on the world stage. “Brazil can make a claim to have done as much or more [on climate] than any other country,” Boyd told me. At the U.N. conference, Brazil is prepared to unveil a major conservation initiative, called the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, to generate international investment to pay an annual amount to countries that preserve their tropical forests.
I spoke to Boyd in July. He had been helping state governments weigh in on this ambitious new finance proposal. But he was still thinking about Schwarzenegger and what he would think of the task force’s growth — at a moment when governors, especially those from Brazil, are about to have a seat at the table of a major climate conference.
A couple weeks later, Boyd got his answer.
“I’ll be back!” was Schwarzenegger’s trademark movie slogan in The Terminator, and sure enough he reunited with the GCF Task Force on July 28 in São Paulo, Brazil.
During a meeting at a conference center with Brazilian governors and environmental secretaries, he praised them and gave bear hugs and advice. He reminded them that he had guided California to reduce climate pollution by 25% “independent of the federal government,” and that governors must dig deep and be ambitious even when it seems unpopular.
“People are tired,” he told governors around a meeting table. “We need to create something new and powerful.”
