Take the train to the United Nations Climate Change Conference 2009 in Copenhagen
The Train to Copenhagen team has one goal: bringing people to Copenhagen and bringing COP15 to the people. Taking the train is part of the solution in combating global warming. Trains are the most environmentally friendly mode of transport, so why would you travel by any other means to the one event in 2009 that can make a difference to the planet’s future? The International Union of Railways (UIC) and its (...)

What is the Copenhagen climate change summit? From December 7 and two weeks forward high level representatives including ministers and state leaders will meet in Copenhagen for the United Nations climate conference to develop a successor to the Kyoto protocol. The talks are the latest in an annual series of UN meetings that trace their origins to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, which aimed at coordinating international action against climate
What is climate change? Climate change is (...)

Fresh or smoked fish for breakfast?
After three days on the train our first chance for a serious change of diet.
Suddenly the view opens up and there on our right lies Lake Baikal. Today its waters are a deep steely grey and ice fringes the shore-line. To our left are the granite (basalt?) cliffs that had to be dynamited back in 1901 to cut a way through for the railway.
The lake conceals a massive rift created as one tectonic plate drifts north-west and the one we are on drifts south-east. (...)

Three quarters of the forest on the Pacific seaboard of Russia has been cut down in the last fifteen years. This was the stark figure we heard from Denis Smirnov* last night. Denis is head of the Forest Programme in this region of Russia, an area that encompasses the coast north to the Arctic, South to the Chinese border and West to the headwaters of the Amur river.
China’s burgeoning economy with its incessant hunger for resources is the final destination for the Russian forests. A hunger (...)