Nobel Peace Prize ups pressure for climate action

[jpak]

http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSPAR25812620071012

OSLO (Reuters) - Awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N. climate panel widens a definition of peacemaking and will raise pressure for the world to agree a new deal to combat global warming.

"I hope this will enhance further a sense of urgency," said Yvo de Boer, the head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat who wants governments to set an end-2009 deadline to work out a new long-term plan to fight global warming.

The secretive Nobel committee, making a first award clearly linking climate change to peace since the prize was set up in 1901, said on Friday: "Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control."

The prize to Gore and the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which has issued reports this year outlining risks of global warming, partly targets the world's environment ministers who will meet in Bali from December 3-14.

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