As 2011 comes to a close, no year-in-review retrospective would be complete without noting the many wild and memorable weather events of the past 12 months. A dozen disasters totaled more than $1 billion in damages each this year, setting a record. You can watch the CBS News interview with Conservancy Lead Scientist M. Sanjayan about the year’s remarkable weather in this post.

Once again, California is taking the lead in addressing climate change. This month, a number of events were held around the state to raise awareness and activism around the issue.

Heading into the Christmas holiday weekend, Planet Change is celebrating the season with a trio of videos all about Christmas trees.

In this video, Frank Lowenstein, director of climate adaptation for The Nature Conservancy shares the top five reasons why you should consider a real, live green tree for your holiday decorations.

A mountain stream’s gurgling and the soft voice of Kao Sisompou, a village forester from Lao People’s Democratic Republic, reverberated off the 300-year-old stone walls of the San Jose ruins. I was seated in the middle of a long nave in what had once been a majestic Spanish church in Antigua, Guatemala, and I reflected on the juxtaposition of setting and the speech’s subject. In a church that had been saved from destruction, I was party to a discussion of the world’s disappearing forests, which are in bad need of rescue.

The annual United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP) Climate Change Conference, COP17 for short, is taking place this week (Nov 28) and next (week of Dec 5) in Durban, South Africa. Check out the official COP17 web site here: http://www.cop17-cmp7durban.com/ The Nature Conservancy is at COP17 to demonstrate how natural solutions can help fight [...]

As someone who’s worked at The Nature Conservancy for over 15 years, I suppose you could say I’m a professional tree-hugger. In fact, a large portion of my professional life has been spent protecting forest health. So what I’m going to say next may sound a bit out of character: This holiday season, go cut down a tree. And ask your friends and family to do the same.

What does climate change mean for Africa?

To learn how the planet is changing in Tanzania, watch this video of Elizabeth Gray, an ecologist and Global Climate Change Fellow for the Conservancy’s Africa program, who took time out during the recent United Nations climate change conference in Durban, South Africa, to explain climate adaptation work underway in Tanzania.

The world is not used to hearing good news out of United Nations climate negotiations. Yet the agreement reached early Sunday morning in Durban, South Africa, has potential to truly be significant. Not for the immediate steps it will take to save the climate or its level of ambition – it falls way short on both [...]

DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA — After negotiations that lasted into overtime by an extra day and night, governments from 194 countries meeting at the UN climate conference in Durban, South Africa have agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol to reduce carbon emissions. They also established a pathway that should lead to a more ambitious global framework for reducing emissions, and have opened the Green Climate Fund to assist developing countries’ efforts to address climate change.

“These agreements are important steps forward for global cooperation, yet it is clear that the outcomes in Durban fall well short of meeting the urgency of the climate challenge,” said Duncan Marsh, international climate policy director at The Nature Conservancy.

The closing hour for the COP 17 climate change summit has come and gone, but the parties have agreed to keep negotiating on Saturday morning (that’s around 2 am Eastern Standard Time in the U.S.) Media reports were somewhat encouraging Thursday in that the U.S. and some other nations appeared to be signaling increased flexibility [...]

Much of the media attention has focused on the high-level talks in closed-door meetings at the United Nations climate summit, but these annual conventions also serve to mobilize people, enabling networking, the exchange of creative ideas, and the search for symbols to inspire the challenging work that lies ahead for all nations in response to climate change.

Both opponents to climate action and activists for a global response to global warming stepped up their protests and pressure on delegates from the world’s nations, who continued to talk into the final hours of COP 17 in Durban.

In the East African nation of Mozambique, where 90 percent of the people live on less than $2 a day and depend heavily on fishing for survival, The Nature Conservancy is using its scientific expertise on the effects of climate change to protect and conserve fragile coral reefs. In the Primeiras and Segundas Archipelagos off Mozambique’s northern [...]

When I grow up, I want to be Jane Goodall.

Dr. Goodall’s time spent in the forests of Africa mean that she not only understands the intrinsic value and beauty of the forests themselves, she also deeply understands the interconnection of people and forests.

Yesterday, while addressing a crowd of hundreds at the Avoided Deforestation Partners event in COP-17 in Durban, she laid it out quite simply, as she recounted her return to Lake Tanganyika where poverty has fueled the deforestation that destroyed the once lush forests that surrounded the lake: “we can’t save the forests if we can’t save the people.”

As the high-level negotiators get down to business at the United Nations climate summit in Durban, the world is awaiting the outcome.

With the global economy facing its own set of challenges, many analysts have predicted that a major break-through on a deal to limit global carbon emissions is unlikely. Nonetheless, many observers still hold out hope that significant progress might be made on a more limited range of issues, including the possibility of some intermediate process that would create yardsticks for the negotiations over the next several years.

Durban must bring the new international Green Climate Fund to life. There is nothing less at stake this week than the food, water, jobs, and security blankets of millions of families throughout the world.

China and Canada (not to mention the U.S.) are making headlines for their COP 17 positions, while many of their citizens have traveled to Durban to seek climate progress.