Dani Kaye ,SGR’s Press Officer planned and co-ordinated the publicity for the Climate Train. In June she began the campaign to bring the Climate Train into the public eye, with dozens of phone-calls to systematically selected targets - i.e., the major national and international newspapers, science publications, organisations like the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) and ITV (Independent Television channel in the UK), and radio stations - both national and local. This yielded a preliminary list of individuals interested in receiving regular information about the project. Over the Internet, colleagues and interested parties were asked to volunteer to forward news releases to local outlets and to help with international dissemination, while mailing lists of other organisations were plundered for possible recipients. The first press release was issued when we were relatively certain that funding would be adequate to send at least a few people to Kyoto overland. The list of organisations requesting regular updates swelled into the hundreds. There were volunteers in Germany, France, the USA and the Philippines who were accepting our press releases, and translating them if necessary before disseminating them to their various areas. In the case of the Philippine correspondent our releases were going to all the major TV, radio and press outlets in the Pacific arena, including Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. A number of schools in New Jersey, USA, followed the Climate Train and held parallel ‘Climate Change negotiations’ as part of an educational programme on Global Warming. A celebrity endorsement was also obtained from Ben Elton.

Whilst on board the train, and at Kyoto updates from train members were sent by fax and email to Dani, who then disseminated them to various agencies for example the Press Association, Rochdale Observer Group, Science News Agency, Eco-Logica Ltd, Union Pictures and UK News and many others amongst her long list of contacts. Regular new updates and later photographs were also put on the Climate Train web page. However there were so many parallel events in Kyoto keeping us busy all over the city that it was hard to find spare moments to sit and write as many emails as Dani would have liked, and even then it was not easy to find a spare computer in the NGO event hall. Below Dani Kaye gives her general conclusions on the process from her end of the line:

Several members of the group were also sending information back to contacts in their own countries, for example Sergey Pashenko and Yuri Doublianski regularly reported to newspapers and television stations in Novosibirsk, Oras Tynkkynen sent reports to colleagues in Finland, and Wolfgang Pomrehn, Berthold van Maris, and Sun Yu, who all work as freelance journalists, sent many reports to their colleagues at home.

Both Dani Kaye in the UK, and our colleagues in the Cool Action Kobe and ASEED Japan, tried to collect press clippings and gossip of other reports about the Climate Train from around the world.

Many Japanese newspapers covered our arrival in Kobe (published the next morning on 27th November), with photographs of us carrying many bags off the ferry and later singing our climate song in the "save the climate" T-shirts at the welcome party in Genki village. These include Kobe News, Yomiuri, Sankei, and Nihon Keizai.

An article also appeared in the Japanese Environmental Times and in many other papers - some of us have newspaper clippings which we carefully took home, yet now, not reading Japanese, it is hard for us to identify where they come from, such as these photographs of our aircraft action shown below.

Asahi -a widely read national paper, covered us twice -both on 30th November when we arrived in Kyoto after our bicycle journey, and again a week later when a full colour page spread all about the Climate Train appeared -shown overleaf reduced in size. Notice Christina making the frame for the aircraft to be used in the action, Tatiana meditating, and Michelle designing a leaflet on the computer.

This photographer must have done well because her photograph of us cycling out of the temple appeared in many different newspapers, including the English-language "Kansai News". Michelle Valentine recalls:

Thanks to Dani’s efforts, and also many articles sent by Richard Scrase, coverage of the Climate Train was especially good in UK newspapers, and journals. All the major broadsheets, The Independent, The Guardian , The Times and The Observer, all covered us, as did the The Times Higher Education Supplement. . Local newspaper articles included those in The Bath Chronicle, The Bristol Evening Post, Wandsworth Borough News, and The Eastern Daily Press,.

There were also many articles in journals, including New Scientist, and New Internationalist .

Articles also appeared in many more specialist publications such as Green Futures, Green World (UK Green Party Newspaper), The Planet on Sunday, Positive News, Peace News, Journal of Engineers and Architects for Social Responsibility, and Ziggurat (UEA journal).

Many Russian newspapers told the story of our Novosibirsk conference on the "Role of Siberia in the Global Climate", including Sovyetskaya Sibir ("Soviet Siberia"), Chestnoye Slovo ("Honest Word"). One "economic" newspaper Rossiskaya Avia even published the full text of the conference "resolution", similar to the one translated into English earlier in this report. The top half of this is shown above

The Social Ecological Union also sent out a press release, the top of which is shown below, to many Moscow newspapers. Although many reporters turned up to interview us at our press conference, we were not able to find out later how much coverage there had been.

Wolfgang Pomrehn also wrote many articles for Neues Deutschland in Germany, where there were also articles in GreenCity News, and Zuendfunk Magazine

In the USA articles about the Climate Train appeared in the Washington Post and the New York Academy of Science Journal. In Southern Asia it was covered in the newspaper ‘South’.

There were probably many many more articles in the USA and other countries, particularly following our television coverage, but as we had nobody there to collect them we may never hear of many of these. Here Ben Matthews describes one unexpected example from China:

There was also much reporting of the Climate Train’s on the internet, for example on One-World online and Worldnet as well as links to our own web page.

We had hoped that a long television report would be made of our Climate Train, and before departure Dani Kaye persued many media contacts to try and secure a deal with an interested TV company. Several small companies were interested but later pulled out because they were worried about the expense and technical difficulties of sending a camera crew on the journey (not least the problem of visas!). However at the eleventh hour ITV’s Channel Four News (mainstream UK televison channel) confirmed their intention to film both the Climate Train and the Siberian forest fires in Novosibirsk. Reporter Andrew Veitch and cameraman Malcolm Hicks flew out to join the group as the train arrived in Novosibirsk. Initially they filmed the dramatic scene of peat fires in the forest near the city, accompanied by a face to face interview with Sergey Pashenko and local officials. The two then joined us on the train as far as Beijing, and took some footage of the Climate Train on the move, including an interview with Ben Matthews on the train. The finished 15-minute report was sent from Beijing, to emphasise China’s key role in the Climate negotiations. It made the leading Channel 4 News story in the UK on the first night of the Climate Convention in Kyoto, leading to an interview with Deputy Prime-Minister John Prescott. Many of our friends back at home were most impressed. A slightly differently edited version of the report was also networked widely across the USA, as Ben Matthews recalls:

A similar report by the Novosibirsk State Television-Radio Company, showing Sergei Pashenko explaining about the forest fires and our Climate Conference in Novosibirsk, was networked on Russian television channels 10 and 12. Later, when we were in Kyoto, the Siberians invited Igor Khorev and Valeri Vinogradov from the Russian State Radio and Broadcasting Company to our temple to interview the members of the Climate Train.. The Social Ecological Union had also ensured that our press conference in Moscow had featured in various reports.

Meanwhile back in London Phil Webber and Tim Foxon made a live interview on BBC television 24hr news, on the strength of Scientists for Global Responsibility’s high media profile during the COP as organisers of the Climate Train.

After we returned in January Richard Scrase appeared on BBC TV South West and also gave a series of interviews over several days to his local radio stations, for example BBC Wiltshire, and BBC Bristol as well as to the national radio programme BBC Radio 5 Live. The Climate Train was also mentioned in many other television programmes around the world, for example "Tommorow’s World": (UK) and "Vechernii Novosibirsk" (Evening Novosibirsk).

Our actions in Kyoto itself also attracted a lot of televsion cameras, as Zuzanna Iskierka describes:

We also had our own cameraman travelling with us (Richard Schofield) who took many hours of footage during the whole journey. He had hoped to sell this to an independent environmental television company and posted the best tapes to them in Tokyo but for some reason this deal fell through. Although some of the footage has already been used in a few minute montage for the 1998 Brighton Festival.

However we need to secure additional funding to cover the costs of editing this footage and producing our own documentary film about the journey which would explain the reasons for travelling by train and boat, the "ecobalance" calculation, our experiences from the journey, and the issues raised by our conferences.