The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize was jointly awarded on Friday to former United States vice-president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Norwegian Nobel committee said.
It was awarded ”for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”, the committee said.
Gore, a vice-president to Bill Clinton and failed candidate for the White House in 2000, has reinvented himself as a champion of climate change with his 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth.
The IPCC, a UN body comprised of about 3 000 atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, ice specialists, economists and other experts, is the world’s top scientific authority on global warming and its impact.
The peace laureates will receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10-million Swedish kronor ($1,53-million), to be shared between them.
The formal prize ceremony will be held in Oslo as tradition dictates on December 10, the anniversary of the death in 1896 of the prize’s creator, Swedish industrialist and inventor of dynamite Alfred Nobel.
The prizes were first awarded in 1901.
Earlier this week, the prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry were announced.
On Thursday, British writer Doris Lessing won the Nobel Literature Prize for five decades of epic novels that have covered feminism and politics, as well her youth in Africa.
The economics prize will wrap up the 2007 Nobel season on Monday. – AFP