A central tenet of John Kerry’s time as Secretary of State has been an emphasis on climate change. In a speech in Indonesia this year, he compared the threat of changing climate conditions to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Though the United States has been slow to enact major climate legislation, the Department of State has developed a “road map” for responding in its own way. The REDD+ program could play a major role in this response, says Melanie Nakagawa of the department’s policy planning staff in this week’s podcast.

A central tenet of John Kerry’s time as Secretary of State has been an emphasis on climate change. In a speech in Indonesia this year, he compared the threat of changing climate conditions to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Though the United States has been slow to enact major climate legislation, the Department of State has developed a “road map” for responding in its own way. The REDD+ program could play a major role in this response, says Melanie Nakagawa of the department’s policy planning staff in this week’s podcast.

REDD+, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, is an effort by the parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to financially incentivize the preservation of forestlands in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Beyond the immediate effects of reducing deforestation, which are substantial, Nakagawa says REDD+ is a good investment because it can bridge climate change concerns across different State and USAID initiatives.

For example, REDD+ programs can help address gender inequity. Nakagawa notes that gender is one of Kerry’s three “core areas” of climate change policy, and that the effects of climate change are compounded by inequity for many women.

When she visited USAID’s Hariyo Ban project, which is working to preserve forests in Nepal’s Terai and Chitwan-Annapurna regions, Nakagawa says she was told by community members that women used to make up about 30 percent of their community forestry committees, as required by law. But they did not have any real say in decision-making until after USAID training on governance, organization, and gender equity. Now women make up more than half of the forestry committees in the area and have an active role, she says.

Nakagawa sees this as indicative of how REDD+ programs can be used to affect “political empowerment, social empowerment, and economic empowerment.” Women are vital “change agents” in their communities, who “drive the technology solutions needed to address the climate change issue.”

“USAID has done a lot of great work on the ground,” says Nakagawa, but the United States could benefit from further expanding its collaboration with the private sector on REDD+. We should use “the best aspects of the private sector and their interest in markets to our advantage,” she says. To this end, the Department of State recently established the Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes, in collaboration with Norway and the United Kingdom, with the goal of reaching out to the private sector at an international scale and asking them to “think about how to source agricultural commodities in places that are implementing jurisdictional REDD-scale projects.”

The goal is to get everyone thinking about climate change and its impacts, she says. “How can everybody – not just our climate negotiators or environment team – but how can everybody in the department be part of the mission to fulfill this idea of climate change as a priority?”