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.

As a film about the life and legacy of Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathai continues to air on television, Planet Change shares a memorial tribute to the Green Belt Movement founder from The Nature Conservancy’s Duncan Marsh.

How did the United Nations climate talks in Durban, South Africa, leave work on the details of global climate policy, such as adaptation, reducing deforestation and climate finance? Read updates on promising decisions, and some that will require much more work, from the Conservancy’s climate policy experts.

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 [...]

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.

I stood at the 18th floor window – with a dense fog and warm rain blowing in off the Indian Ocean – wondering about how different the planet will be for the next generation.

The COP 17 climate change conference in Durban is entering a second week of negotiations with higher-level envoys entering the stage.