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.

REDD+ is a critical piece of the climate-change puzzle, and this forest solution also has the potential to be transformative in benefiting communities, ecosystems, and biodiversity.

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.

Forests have come to stand as a near-universal symbol for nature and the environmental movement.

But in the environmental context, green really means one thing: forests. Forests have come to stand as a near-universal symbol for nature and the environmental movement. They even speak to the increasing percentage of the global population that lives in cities, who are far more dependent on forests than they perhaps realize.

This connection — between people and forests — underpins the second Asia Pacific Forestry Week that took place from Nov. 7-11 in Beijing (and is also the theme of the 2011 UN-declared International Year of Forests).

The Nature Conservancy, is involved in a very exciting agreement between the Indonesian and U.S. governments and WWF to inject significant additional investments into forest conservation efforts on the Indonesian part of the island of Borneo.

This op-ed, which ran in Indonesia’s Jakarta Post, seeks to demonstrate that forest carbon in Indonesia will not only accommodate continued economic growth of forest-related industries, it also has the potential to accelerate the growth of those industries as well as the prosperity of Indonesian people.

Working for healthy tropical forests from still-chilly Norway.

News from Brazil and Indonesia reinforce need for on-the-ground forest protection models with effective incentives for sustainable land use and development.

In-depth reporting on the world’s forests and connections to climate change wins prize for environmental reporting.

What’s for dinner, and where did it come from? Thinking beyond the fridge can be an everyday (not just Earth Day) exercise.

Country delegates met the first week in April in Bangkok, Thailand for 2011’s first round of United Nations-sponsored climate negotiations. During the meetings, The Nature Conservancy caught up with a few individuals from different parts of the world, including conducting a short interview with one of the most respected voices in the international climate change policy community, Indonesia’s Agus Pornomo.

Very early yesterday, the House Appropriations Committee released the detailed spending bill, H.R. 1473, that implements the three-way agreement among President Obama, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. But what does this mean for U.S. commitments to international climate finance?

Indonesia pledges to reduce emissions and offers the world an example of how to move ahead on REDD.

Check out our Use Your Outside Voice page on Nature.org for more information and to see how you can take action. As we have covered in this space, there are places and people all over the world who will be affected by the long list of dramatic cuts to international conservation and climate change solutions [...]

Despite the current lack of a promising global climate change policy solution, there is at least one bright spot: an expanding global conservation and development effort to Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation that could address 15 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions — more than all the world’s trains, planes and cars.

We learned four lessons at the UN international climate negotiations last month in Cancun.

The Nature Conservancy’s Nawa Irianto and other Conservancy staff are working in Indonesia to reduce the impact of logging practices and maintain healthy forests.