All aboard the Copenhagen Express

The train will run from Kyoto to Copenhagen

One of the issues around holding climate change meetings such as the upcoming Copenhagen talks is how to offset the carbon generated getting to the event by the hundreds of delegates involved.

The UN appears to have hit on one way to avoid carbon-intensive flights for some delegates by laying on a special train service all the way from Kyoto in Japan. The only downside is that it will take a month to get there.

The UN-sponsored 9,000km journey will see a train – or more specifically a carriage – travel from Japan, through Siberia to the Danish capital. The exact route appears to have been slightly fudged, with the journey broken into a variety of stages. Only when the carriage arrives in Brussels will it actually join the Climate Express train which will head onto Copenhagen.

Transport accounts for about one fifth of global CO2 emissions and increased use of train travel could help offset the projected doubling over the next 40 years in transport-related carbon emissions, according to the UN.

"We are on the road to nowhere if existing policies and economic models prevail with their over-emphasis on private cars and on shifting shipments of goods to the roads," said UNEP executive director Achim Steiner.

"The Train to Copenhagen project is a showcase of sustainable transport solutions that will be part and parcel of a resource-efficient, low-carbon Green Economy of the 21st Century."

Also sponsored by the WWF and the International Union of Railways (UIC), the train will leave Kyoto station on the 5 November before eventually arriving in Brussels on 5 December to join the Climate Express which will be powered by 100 per cent renewable energy, according to the UNEP.

Around 400 climate change negotiators and campaigners will travel on the train from Brussels to Copenhagen for a 12-hour conference focusing on how to solve the challenges posed by the transport sector.

The Climate Express will then remain at Copenhagen Central Station throughout the two-week climate talks and serve as a mobile exhibition open to the public about low-carbon transport solutions.

"It is clear that business as usual is not an option if we want to reverse current trends and prevent catastrophic climate change," said UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) executive secretary Yvo de Boer.

"If we can really integrate the costs of pollution into the price of transportation, rail will be a big winner."

Earlier this week, UK industry haulage giant Eddie Stobart said it will replace some of its iconic lorries with an inaugural European rail freight trip. The company's chief executive William Stobart told The Observer that customer pressure had forced the move.

"There has been a real change of attitude from the companies we deal with in recent months," he said. "Suddenly they all want to know if they can have their goods carried in an environmentally sensitive way and, in particular, if they can have them moved by train."

At the beginning of the month, the BBC said its executives have been told they can only fly when travelling by train adds more than three hours to the journey.

The edict, from the BBC's commercial arm, means that staff have to take the train to all domestic locations, as well as European cities as far afield as Strasbourg, Amsterdam and Bordeaux.