The Nobel Peace Prize is
awarded in Oslo Friday, with climate change campaigners Al Gore,
pictured, and Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier among the
favourites to win the top honour.
Former US Vice President Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for
raising awareness of the threat of climate change.
"His strong commitment, reflected in political activity,
lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against
climate change," the citation said.
Gore, who won an Academy Award this year for his film An
Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, had been
widely expected to win the prize.
Climate change has moved high on the international agenda this
year. The UN climate panel has been releasing reports, talks are
set to resume on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, and there is
concern about the melting Arctic.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, "may induce
large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the
earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy
burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be
increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between
states."
Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former UN
undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, also called climate change
more than an environmental issue.
"It is a question of war and peace," said Egeland, now director
of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're
already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of
Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers
because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of
fertile lands.
(Xinhua News Agency,?Associated Press?October 12,
2007)
