Climate change peace prize sparks debate in Norway

Dec 1, 2007, 12:19 GMT

Oslo - One thing links the disparate topics of micro- credits, tree-planting to prevent soil degradation and warnings of the impact of climate change.

Individuals from all three areas have been honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in recent years - prompting discussion about whether the selection committee has moved too far away from the original 'peace' concept and too much in the direction of politicizing the award.

Former US vice president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a 2,500-strong UN panel of scientists, shared the 2007 prize 'for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change,' the Norwegian Nobel Committee said.

The move had some tradition: In 2004, the secretive five-member committee named environmental activist Wangari Maathai of Kenya for promoting 'sustainable development.'

In 2006, it honoured micro-credit pioneer Muhammad Yunus of Bangladesh for his work to increase poor women's access to capital.

But awarding a broader concept of peace has been called into question as straying too far from the intentions of Swedish industrialist and dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel - even if the fate of humanity is potentially at stake.

Nobel wanted to reward 'the most or the best work for fraternity between the nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.'

Even two months before this year's announcement, Fredrik Heffermehl, honorary chairman of the Norwegian Peace Committee that is an umbrella group of some 20 organizations, questioned the trends.

Writing in the leading Oslo daily Aftenposten, Heffermehl said that 'the arms race and development of weapons continue as never before' and argued for a more traditional selection of laureates.

'We also wonder if the prize is at risk of losing its profile,' Frode Restad, executive director of the Norwegian Peace Committee, said in an interview with Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

Stein Tonnesson, director of the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) and another critic of the trend, said the Nobel committee already 'widened' the industrialist's concept with its inaugural prize in 1901, honouring the Red Cross for its humanitarian work.

But while there is some precedent, Tonnesson charged that the broader peace concept was used 'too often' and had failed to recognize the 2005 peace deal in Aceh between the separatist GAM movement and the Indonesian government, which was brokered by former Finnish president Martti Ahtisaari.

'Ahtisaari should really have got it,' Tonnesson said in an interview, referring to the 2006 prize awarded to Yunus and Grameen Bank.

Tonnesson says the broader choices were part of an effort to raise the profile of the award after its 100-year anniversary in 2001. But the Committee has said it was part of its tradition, noting laureates like Norman Borlaug in 1970, cited for the green revolution in agriculture and John Boyd Orr, founder of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, in 1949.

Former Norwegian diplomat Jan Egeland, who recently became director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, defended the 2007 prize as 'highly relevant to the quest for peace to honour those who fight to save our climate.'

Egeland, who from 2003 to 2006 was head of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), said 'we see that climate change is aggravating conflict' and cited the loss of arable land and water resources in Africa.

The 2007 award was 'precisely in the spirit of Alfred Nobel to meet global challenges,' he told dpa. 'Al Gore was also needed because the (climate) panel reports are not read by the common man.'

Gore, who lost a bitter election contest to US President George W Bush in 2000, won an Academy Award earlier this year for his documentary about global warming, An Inconvenient Truth. But Committee chairman Ole Danbolt Mjos insisted during the October 12 announcement that the prize was not meant as criticism of Bush.

'A peace prize is never criticism of anyone, a peace prize is a positive message and support to all peace campaigners in the world,' he said.

Tonnesson did not consider the award a reaction to Bush, but he believed the Nobel Committee needed to present more research to support its claim that 'environmental damage leads to armed conflicts, or that climate change will lead to it.'