Climate champions tipped to win Nobel Peace Prize

OSLO: Former US vice president Al Gore and Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier, both champions of the fight against climate change, are tipped as favourites for the Nobel Peace Prize to be announced on Friday.   

A total of 181 individuals or organisations are known to have been nominated, and the Nobel committee may choose to put this year's spotlight on global warming, seen as a major threat to all of humanity.   

This year's Nobel science prizes for medicine, physics and chemistry all went to discoveries that have practical applications in our everyday lives, and while each prize is selected by an independent award committee the trend could be repeated with a peace prize to those trying to save the planet.    But the five-member Norwegian Nobel Committee was tight-lipped.   

"We've made our decision and it will be announced on Friday," the secretary of the committee, Geir Lundestad said, refusing to say more. Observers have thus resorted to the guessing game.    The head of the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo, Stein Toennesson, said he thought Gore and Watt-Cloutier had a good chance of taking the honours.   

"This year when the climate issue is at the centre of attention, the Nobel committee could choose to add its part to the awareness campaign by giving the prize to Al Gore and Sheila Watt-Cloutier," he said.   

Gore, now 59 and who served as Bill Clinton's vice president, has brought global warming to the top of the international agenda with his 2006 film "An Inconvenient Truth", which received an Oscar for best documentary. Less known to the public is Watt-Cloutier, 53, also a die-hard defender of the planet.   

The former head of the Inuit Circumpolar Conference, she has championed the rights of the Arctic peoples, whose way of life is dependent on the ice and cold and which is now threatened by temperatures that are rising faster than anywhere else on Earth.   

A peace prize for the duo would come just weeks before the December 3-14 UN conference in Bali aimed at finding a roadmap for the next set of emissions reductions under the Kyoto Protocol, Toennesson pointed out.   

However, predictions on possible winners are pure speculation: the Nobel committee keeps the nominees' identities secret for 50 years, though those entitled to nominate candidates are allowed to reveal their choice. "The secretary of the Nobel committee, Mr Lundestad, told me I was free to speculate as long as my speculations were wrong. I haven't disappointed him very often," Toennesson admitted. But Jan Egeland, the head of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and former UN emergency relief coordinator, said he also believed the fight against climate change was worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.   

"The one really big cloud on the horizon is the climate change cloud," he said. Other possible winners in the same field are the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), gathering the world's top climate scientists, and its chairman Rajendra Pachauri of India.  The committee has over the years broadened the prize's scope from the traditional fields of conflict prevention and resolution and disarmament to include humanitarian aid work and human rights.  

And recently, the prestigious award has honoured the defence of the environment -- Kenyan ecologist Wangari Maathai won in 2002 -- and the fight against poverty, with Bangladeshi microcredit pioneer Muhammad Yunus and his Grameen Bank winning last year. The committee could therefore choose to return to a stricter definition of peace this year, according to some observers.   

In such case, former Finnish president and mediator Martti "Ahtisaari would be at the top of the list," Egeland said. The 70-year-old career diplomat oversaw the August 2005 peace accord between the Indonesian government and rebels of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM) which brought an end to a three-decade conflict that had claimed 15,000 lives. Among the outsiders for the prize are human rights advocates, such as Chechen human rights lawyer Lidiya Yusupova, Chinese exile Rebiya Kadeer who has fought for the rights of Uighur Muslims and Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Do.

The 2007 laureate will receive a gold medal, a diploma and 10 million Swedish kronor (1.53 million dollars, 1.08 million euros). Friday's announcement is due at 11:00 am (0900 GMT).