The New Nation - Internet Edition

THIS year the prestigious Nobel Peace Prize has been awarded to United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former US Vice-President Albert Arnold Gore (Al Gore) for their contributions to the fight against climate change. This is the second incident of awarding the Prize to crusaders for protection of the environment. The first occasion was the awarding of the Prize in 2004 to Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai for founding the Green Belt Movement, which helped African women to plant over 30 million trees. This decision of the Nobel Committee deserves high marks. We join all to felicitate the IPCC and Al Gore on their outstanding work to help reverse the process of climate change.

Environmentalists and ecologists the world over enthusiastically acclaimed this decision of the Nobel Committee. Some of them saw it as a victory for the planet and its inhabitants. UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon hailed Gore's commitment to the issue and the IPCC's work to establish 'beyond doubt' that climate change is a reality. This award is a recognition to the hard work and efforts done by IPCC and Al Gore. They dedicated their efforts to build up and spread knowledge about man-made climate changes, and lay the foundations for the measures needed to counter such changes in the environment. IPCC has concluded that as the world warms - storms, droughts and floods will intensify both in frequency and ferocity leading to the rising of the sea level and other environmental catastrophes. Climate change will also overburden the world's food and water system giving way to escalation of conflicts over resources. The world's poor will be the worst sufferers. On the other hand, Gore spent years to bring a greater awareness of climate change among the people.

The aims of the UN Conferences on environment and sustainable development held so far were to retard or stop the pace of climate change and help pursue economic development in a sustainable manner. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are the main culprits of global warming. It is due to the increasing presence of the greenhouse gases in the environment that the weather is getting warmer day by day. The effect of such climatic change will be disastrous for nature as a whole. With a view to containing the warming process, the world community want to keep the emission of the gases to tolerable limits. Indiscriminate use of fossil fuel is the main source of emission of the gases. The Kyoto Protocol called for a cut in greenhouse gas emission to at least 5% from 1990 levels within the commitment period 2008-2012. But a number of developed countries are yet to ratify the Protocol. It is hoped that the awarding of the Peace Prize to climate change fighters will strengthen the struggles for a better and inhabitable world.