Among the signs of a spring come early in 2012, are the arrival of ramps – a garlicky wild leek favored by chefs buying local ingredients.

What could baseball – and 100-year-old Fenway Park in Boston – possibly have in common with nature conservation? In this post and video, Mark Anderson, The Nature Conservancy’s Science Director for the U.S. Eastern region, explains why some places are special.

Looking ahead, Pacific islanders are making community plans to cope with rising sea levels. And on some low-lying coral atolls, that includes contingency plans to relocate farmland, and even people, elsewhere.

Nature can help people innovate as we search for solutions to deal with rapid environmental change. The Nature Conservancy’s adaptation expert, Frank Lowenstein, joined a radio discussion this week on how innovation can help us cope with challenges like sea levels rising on the edges of our cities.

With Hurricane Irene in recent memory, Connecticut considers ways to promote local coastal planning for higher seas and the potential for damage from storms. New Coastal Resilience planning tools are available online.

A Nature Conservancy marine scientist has co-authored a new study that isolates the effects of human-generated carbon pollution from seasonal and regional variations in ocean chemistry. The findings indicate that the oceans are rapidly becoming more acidic, and in some regions, the man-made rate of change since the Industrial Revolution is 100 times greater than the natural variations since the last ice age.

During the marathon two weeks of meetings during the COP 17 United Nations climate change talks late last year, members of The Nature Conservancy’s delegation took time out to talk with local students who were attending the conference. Planet Change shares a few snapshots from Durban, South Africa.

Frank Lowenstein, The Nature Conservancy’s climate adaptation strategy leader, discusses how people are preparing for a changing planet – from drought and wildfires to rising seas – on Public Radio International’s Living on Earth. Check out the full interview.

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.

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.

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 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 [...]

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.

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.