A Novel Precedent to Nobel Peace Prize

The announcement of Nobel Peace Prize this year has in fact surprised the world because of its unusual nomination for a scientific body (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) and a person who is well known (?) for environmental activism (Albert Arnold Gore Jr). The award was unusual in the sense that, in the past Peace Prize was given for maintaining international peace by bringing in fraternity between nations and communities, for abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding promotion of peace congresses. The criticisms involved in the statements that ‘link between climate change and peace is very remotely made’ and ‘Al Gore is a peace breaker as he partnered Bill Clinton in bombing Kosovo, Afghanistan and Sudan’.
However it seems that the decision of the Norwegian Nobel Committee to choose these two delivers a message that the environmental issues are more nagging than that of terrorism and aggression. Though terrorism, violence and all sorts of aggression are live, the whole world community is under the BLACK blanket of global warming. The joint Nobel Award to the IPCC and Gore is thus a pointer to the increasingly apparent maxim in many spheres of human activity that science and public campaign need to go hand in hand if political action at national and international level is required. Given the context of the threat of climate change and its disastrous impacts, one may even squabble that these winners are much more admirable than some former winners of the peace prize. Climate change is a truly unifying phenomenon in that it affects the entire world irrespective of national borders, cultures and political structures.

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL FOR CLIMATE CHANGE
The IPCC was established in 1988 by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization to provide independent scientific advice on the complex and important issue of climate change. Its mandate was to prepare, on the basis of available scientific information, reports on all aspects relevant to climate change and its impacts and to formulate realistic response strategies. It has a Plenary panel, three Working groups (The science of climate system, Impact and adaptation and Mitigation), a Task force on National greenhouse gas inventories, four units in Technical support (in the UK, the US, the Netherlands and Japan). There are Experts, authors, contributors and reviewers who provide assistance in its working. The IPCC now led by Rajendra K. Pachaouri (present Chairman) has recently reported that “much more evidence has accumulated over the past five years to indicate that changes in physical and biological systems are linked to anthropogenic warming.

(Reference: Frontline, November16, 2007)