Al Gore's win a triumph for the planet Worldwatch, the global environmental monitoring agency, welcomed the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as a "triumph for the planet and its inhabitants". Worldwatch issued a press release headlined "Planet Wins Nobel Prize". "It is with extreme satisfaction that we receive the news that Gore and the IPCC have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize," said Oystein Dahle, Chairman of the Board of Worldwatch Institute and a leading Norwegian environmentalist. Speaking from his home in Oslo where the Prize was announced, Dahle said: "With their decision, the Nobel Committee has for the second time signalled that peace with the environment is an essential requirement if we are to have peace between human beings." Asked for his reaction former US Vice President Gore, whose documentary film An Inconvenient Truth won an Oscar at the 2007 Academy Awards, said he hoped the award would bring a "greater awareness and a sense of urgency" to the fight against global warming. The Norwegian Nobel Committee said that the impact of the prize winners' work has helped to "lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract [climate] change". The Committee praised the contribution made by the IPCC with its more than two decades of scientific reports comprising the expertise of more than 2,000 leading climate change scientists and experts. It was such reports, said the Nobel Committee, which gradually built a broader and better informed "consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming". Of Al Gore, the Committee said: "He is probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted." "We face a true planetary emergency," Mr Gore warned. "It is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity." Asked what he intended to do with his share of the prize money (in total $1.5m) Gore said that he is donating it to the Alliance for Climate Protection. The IPCC report stated that with global warming will come storms, droughts, floods and increased natural disasters and so tax the world's food and water systems. These in their turn can be cause for conflicts over territory and resources. The world's poor, who already suffer from a lack of clean water, sanitation and food security, will be most directly affected. "Climate change is the greatest long-term threat to peace and security the world has ever known," says Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch Institute President. "This prize marks another turning point for the climate issue the question now is whether lawmakers around the world will rise to the challenge of implementing new treaties and laws that reduce the world's dangerous addiction to fossil fuels." (Source: Worldwatch Press Release; BBC Online; Nobelprize.org)
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