Nobel Prize to climate change campaigners a message to world leaders

The fact that climate change campaigners were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize should serve to strengthen the global message that this topic was crucial to long-term security, Malta's ambassador for climate change said yesterday.

Michael Zammit Cutajar was pleasantly surprised by the news that climate change campaigner Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

A former executive secretary at the secretariat of the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change, Mr Zammit Cutajar said the award should encourage world leaders to look at climate change as a security issue and not merely from an environmental perspective.

"Over the past years, the Nobel Peace Prize has been widening its concept of what contributes to peace through its choice of winners.

"This comes at a very good moment in the build-up of some intense negotiations on climate change in the coming years."

Lino Briguglio, director of the University's Islands and Small States Institute, is a member of the IPCC and was the Maltese lead author of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report published this year.

He received an e-mail from the IPCC in Geneva yesterday congratulating him as one of the persons responsible for contributing to the report.

Prof. Briguglio was the lead author on the report's chapter 15, which delved into the impact of climate change on small island states.

"The international community is finally recognising that climate change is an alarming reality. Malta, for example, will lose most of its beaches if the water level goes up by half a metre," he said.

The IPCC, which has released a series of scientific reports over the last two decades, comprises more than 2,000 leading climate change scientists and experts.

The reports had "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming", the committee said.

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme.

It is tasked with assessing scientific data on the risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for mitigation.

Labour Party spokesman Leo Brincat welcomed the news, saying it was very significant that a politician such as Mr Gore was awarded this prestigious prize for his work on climate change.