NEW DELHI, Oct 12 – Lending an Indian connection, the 2007 Nobel Peace prize was today awarded jointly to UN’s top climate panel headed by eminent environmentalist RK Pachauri and former US Vice-President Al Gore, giving a big boost to the international campaign for action against global warming. Pachauri(67),Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC), who was in Delhi when the award was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo,expected the Peace prize to add a “sense of urgency” to the fight against global warming.
The IPCC, set up in 1988, comprises 3,000 atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, ice specialists, economists and other experts and is the world’s top scientific authority on global warming and its impact.
Gore and the IPCC, were cited by the Nobel Committee 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.”
An elated Gore(59) told Pachauri on telephone from Geneva that they should work together to combat climate change.
“We congratulated each other,” Pachauri,who has a trademark beard, said, adding that “Gore told him ‘we must work together.we should meet as soon as possible.’”
“This is Pachy. I am so delighted and so privileged to have the IPCC share with you.... I will be your follower and you will be my leader,” Pachauri told Bill Clinton’s former Vice-President.
Pachauri thanked his colleagues and well-wishers who assembled outside his office as he cracked a bottle of champagne and sprayed some on them to a loud applause.
The joint winners will receive the 1.5 million dollar prize in Oslo on December 10. IPCC spokeswoman Carola Traverso Saibante said in Geneva that the Nobel selection was a surprise.
“I was not expecting any awards for my efforts. I feel privileged to share it with Al Gore. I am only a symbolic recipient but it is the organisation which has been awarded,” Pachauri told PTI.
“With this award to the committee, the issue of climate change will come to the fore. It places a larger responsibility on me and I will ensure that more will be done,” he said.
Pachauri said climate change threatens to disrupt economic activity and social stability across the world.
“It’s good that the global committee has highlighted the issue.
“By recognising the climate change, the Norwegian Committee wants to stress that something should be immediately done to mitigate the threats of global warming which are near and in real,” the Padma Bushan recipient said.
In fact, he said, “the message should go to every developed and developing countries that climate change is a major issue. And we have to make sure that it does not afflict the inhabitants of this planet.”
Pachauri has been heading the IPCC since 2002 and active in several international fora dealing with the subject of climate change and its policy dimensions.
Pachaur has headed many national and international committee on environment was appointed member, Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in 2001.
Indians who have been conferred with the Nobel Prize so far include Rabindranath Tagore (1913) for literature, Sir C V Raman (1930) for Physics, Dr Hargobind Khurana (1968) for Medicine and Physiology, Dr Subramaniam Chandrasekar (1983) for Physics, Mother Teresa (1979) for Peace and Dr Amartya Sen (1998) for Economics.
The five-member Nobel Committee received 181 nominations this year for Peace Prize.
