The Club of Madrid, the Bellona Foundation and the utility company Hafslund ASA have joined forces and will organize a top level climate conference in Norway 5-6 June 2008.; "Climate Conference 08: Technology and Finance in Climate Cooperation".

Starting out on World Environment Day, the conference will gather 100 exclusively selected international representatives from politics, academia, the private sector and the environmental movement at the Hafslund Manor in Sarpsborg south of Oslo.

Among the distinguished speakers are: Ricardo Lagos, former president of Chile, UN Special Envoy  on climate change and president of the Club of Madrid; Lord Nicholas Stern, author of the notable report on the economic ramifications of climate change; Göran Persson, former Prime Minister of Sweden who, together with Ricardo Lagos, co-chairs the International Socialist Commission for a Sustainable World Society  Also attending from the Club of Madrid will be Jennifer Mary Shipley, former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Kjell Magne Bondevik and Gro Harlem Brundtland, both former Prime Ministers of Norway. The Club of Madrid, the Bellona Foundation and Hafslund ASA set out to organizing a conference that is ambitious, pro-development, creative and solutions-oriented which can act in a joint effort to provide input for the international negotiation process on a new  climate agreement.

Negotiations for a post-2012 global climate change agreement were formally launched at the climate summit in Bali last December and are expected to be concluded in Copenhagen in 2009. With this process now underway, the Club of Madrid, the Bellona Foundation and Hafslund ASA have agreed to join forces to spur ideas for a final agreement that will be both ambitious and realistic, as well as providing predictability in efforts to combat climate change.

Thorough discussions in small working groups will enable the drafting of ambitious, creative and solutions-oriented recommendations in a final statement from the conference. In order to inform the post-2012 negotiations, the aim will be to reach out to both negotiators and policy makers and industry and the business community.

At the Bali summit, it was agreed to concentrate the negotiations on mitigation, adaptation, technology and finance. The CC8 conference «Technology and Finance in Climate Cooperation» will focus specifically on what technology and finance provisions a new agreement on climate change should include.

The co-organizers are convinced that successful outcomes in these fields will be essential to enable ambitious overall emission reduction targets (the overall objective of an agreement) and solve the contradiction between, on the one hand, rich countries’ responsibility for climate change and, on the other hand, the necessity to limit emissions also of emerging economies.