The Nature Conservancy’s Frank Lowenstein is headed to Peru on an official visit as part of his fellowship with the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas.

Climate Change News is a Planet Change selection of the latest news on climate change, nature, our environment and the impacts of a changing planet. Continue reading to find out what’s good to know this week.

From Seattle to Sweden, an ever-growing number of city and regional governments are using roof gardens, specially designed wetlands, and other forms of “green infrastructure” to rein in pollution from countless diffuse sources — and to save money.

Frank Lowenstein of The Nature Conservancy talks about how we can respond to and prepare for climate change.

A new book, “A Great Aridness,” takes a closer look at the changes underway in North America’s Southwestern landscapes and what lessons this region’s experiences offer for the future.

Tomorrow, The Nature Conservancy and The New York Academy of Sciences launch a four-part “Discourses on Nature and Society” event series with a moderated panel discussion Energy for the Next 20 Years: Protecting the Environment and Meeting Our Demands from 6:30p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at The New York Academy of Sciences.

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.

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.

As governments gather in Durban, South Africa this week for the annual U.N. climate negotiations – which run through December 9 – they will face the essential business of advancing the Cancun Agreements of last December.

Cancun reached some important breakthroughs on climate finance, technology, adaptation, and protecting forests, but left many of the finer details to be worked out. This has all been happening throughout the past year, and is indeed important work, even if it does not yet reflect the ambition needed to keep our global temperature from increasing beyond 2 degrees Celsius – a dangerous threshold for climate impacts.

Professionals ranging from scientists to military leaders have all concluded that our world’s climate is changing, and they are asking policy makers to start getting America ready for the impending changes.

Seas are already changing parts of Florida’s coast, and other low-lying regions.

Check out this interview with The Nature Conservancy’s Anne Bradley, forest conservation program director in the Conservancy’s New Mexico chapter.
Bradley talks about how trees can help by not only storing carbon and pulling carbon from the atmosphere but also by helping nearby communities better adapt (by, for example, helping to maintain or improve the availability of clean drinking water to people at lower elevations).

Climate change is upon us. There’s a risk that the populace will jump from disbelief to despondency, with no space for the critical emotion of outrage and the determination to do what we can to prevent runaway climate change and to start planning for how we will adapt to the slower changes. The headlines are not the whole story. Let’s not give up before we start.

The extreme floods across the U.S. this spring have been historic. The effects on local communities and individual lives are devastating. The core message is clear: the risk for the future is great; and we must find more solutions to reduce this risk and help us cope with its impacts.

With extreme floods currently threatening communities along the Mississippi, The Nature Conservancy in Louisiana’s executive director Dr. Keith Ouchley is forced to think about the events in Louisiana of only the past several years – epic hurricanes, an oil spill of historic proportions, and now a raging flood on the nation’s largest river of which the likes hadn’t been seen in nearly 100 years.

This past week, country delegates met in Bangkok, Thailand for 2011’s first round of United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations, which will culminate with the big annual conference — this year in Durban, South Africa — in December. In Bangkok, the focus has been on how to move forward after last year’s conference in Cancún, Mexico. Key [...]

I was lucky enough to recently attend a Boeing-hosted pre-screening of the movie Carbon Nation. Overall, I think the movie is fantastic (it is worth at least checking out the trailer above). The movie mostly focuses on what positive innovations people are finding to reduce our overload of carbon pollution. Stories are included on wind, solar, algae fuel, geothermal, coal vs. trees, forest carbon, grassland carbon farming, energy efficiency, Department of Defense energy efficiency, green building, building green retrofit, and more.