Nobel Peace Prize 2007: The IPCC Al Gore and Climate Change
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This note covers the Nobel Peace Prize 2007: who won it, why climate science and climate advocacy were treated as peace work, what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore actually did, how the case for the award built up over nearly two decades, why the Norwegian Nobel Committee linked global warming to war and conflict, and quick facts for exams.
What was the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 awarded for?
The Norwegian Nobel Committee gave the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former United States Vice President Al Gore.
The official citation reads: "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".
In plain words, the Committee honoured two very different kinds of effort that pointed in the same direction. The IPCC had spent nearly twenty years gathering, checking and publishing the scientific evidence that human activity was warming the planet.
Al Gore had spent a similar stretch of time turning that evidence into a message ordinary people and politicians could understand and act on.
The Committee judged that building this shared understanding, and preparing the ground for the policy steps that would be needed, was itself a contribution to peace, because unchecked climate change could threaten the security and living conditions of large parts of humanity.
The prize is formally known as the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded each year by the Norwegian Nobel Committee in Oslo.
Who are the laureates?
The prize was shared equally between an international scientific body and an individual politician turned campaigner, a combination that itself signalled how broadly the Committee was reading the idea of peace work.
Who is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change?
The IPCC was founded in 1988 in New York, NY, USA, set up by the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization as a follow-up to the 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future.
It received one half of the prize. Its task was to bring the world's scientists together in a continuous process of assessing the degree, causes and consequences of climate change, and the possible counter-measures.
By the time of the award, more than 130 countries were taking part, with roughly 450 authors and 800 contributors, and about 2,500 scientific experts taking part in the hearings, with governments also reviewing the reports.
Between 1990 and 2007 the IPCC produced four major assessment reports that, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, created "an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming".
Who is Al Gore?
Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. was born on 31 March 1948 in Washington, D.C., USA, and his residence at the time of the award was the USA. He received the other one half of the prize.
Gore had been a member of the United States House of Representatives, later Vice President of the United States, and by 2007 had become a full-time environmental campaigner and author.
The Nobel Committee's own account calls him "probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted" against climate change.
What problem were the laureates responding to?
In the 1980s, global warming was still, in the Committee's words, "merely an interesting hypothesis" to much of the public and many politicians.
Scientists disagreed on how fast the planet was warming and how much of it was caused by humans burning fossil fuels, clearing forests and releasing greenhouse gases.
There was no single trusted body that could tell governments what the state of the evidence actually was.
The 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future, had already raised the alarm about environment and development together, and it led directly to the creation of the IPCC the following year.
Through the 1990s, as the IPCC's reports accumulated, the evidence for human-caused warming grew firmer, and by the 2000s the Committee said "the connections have become even clearer and the consequences still more apparent".
Alongside the science, a political and public gap remained: evidence alone does not change policy unless people in power and in daily life understand and act on it.
Al Gore's career after leaving office was aimed at closing exactly that gap, using books, lectures, a film and a worldwide speaking campaign to carry the scientific message beyond laboratories and government reports into ordinary political debate.
What did the IPCC do to earn this prize?
The IPCC's contribution was to turn climate science into a shared, internationally agreed body of knowledge rather than a scattered set of competing claims.
It did this through four successive assessment reports, each one more detailed and more confident than the last, produced with the participation of governments as well as scientists so that the findings could not easily be dismissed as one country's or one laboratory's opinion.
| Year | IPCC report | What it established |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | First assessment report | Became one of the basic documents behind the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and climate |
| 1995 | Second assessment report | Laid much of the foundation for the 1997 Kyoto Agreement |
| 2001 | Third assessment report | Further consolidated the scientific base for human-caused warming |
| 2007 | Fourth assessment report | Fed directly into the Nobel Committee's decision and the Bali climate talks that followed |
The Norwegian Nobel Committee's presentation speech called this process "fundamentally innovative", because earlier scientific mobilisations, such as campaigns against nuclear weapons, had usually grown out of moral or political movements, whereas here it was the United Nations and its member states that had organised the scientific community itself into a continuous, government-reviewed process.
The Committee suggested that a similar model could be used for other global problems, naming biological diversity, desertification and over-fishing as examples.
What did Al Gore do to earn this prize?
Al Gore's contribution, in the Committee's reading, was political communication rather than scientific discovery. As a young member of the House of Representatives in the 1970s, he organised hearings on greenhouse-gas emissions when the subject was still, in the Committee's description, "seen as a relatively exotic subject" and attracted "derogatory terms" aimed at his commitment.
In 1992, the year he was elected Vice President, Gore published Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose, which proposed what the Committee called a global Marshall Plan to save the biosphere, and which became a bestseller in the USA.
As Vice President he signed the Kyoto Agreement, although the US Senate opposed ratification. After losing the 2000 presidential election, Gore built what the Committee described as "a completely new career" as a leading political voice on the environment, culminating in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which the Committee noted contains sixteen pages of advice on what individuals can personally do.
The Norwegian Nobel Committee said he had become "one of the world's leading environmentalist politicians", and the Committee's facts page on Gore records that it considered him "the great communicator" who had done most to push governments and the public toward taking climate action seriously.
Why did the Norwegian Nobel Committee call climate change a matter of peace?
The Committee's presentation speech directly asked why a scientific panel and a climate campaigner deserved a peace prize, and answered that the Committee has "always had a broad approach to peace", looking beyond war between states to what it called "human security": protecting individuals from violence, but also from starvation, disease and natural disaster.
On that reasoning, environmental breakdown is a security threat in its own right. The Committee pointed to melting glaciers in the Himalayas, which supply half of the fresh water needed by around 40 percent of the world's population, desertification in China and Africa, and flooding of low-lying areas such as Bangladesh.
It argued that scarce resources under climate pressure can fuel conflict, citing what it called the first "climate war" in Darfur and the wider Sahel belt, where desertification was pushing nomads and farmers into competition and clashes.
The Committee also noted that the UN Security Council had, in April 2007, held its first debate on climate and conflict, and quoted Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon's warning that strained ecosystems can lead to "a breakdown of established codes of conduct, and even outright conflict".
The press release itself stated plainly: "Action is necessary now, before climate change moves beyond man's control."
How did the work develop?
The case the Nobel Committee eventually honoured did not appear suddenly in 2007; it was built up over almost two decades of parallel scientific and political work, as the timeline below shows.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1988 | The IPCC is founded in New York by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, following the 1987 Brundtland Report. |
| 1990 | The IPCC's first assessment report is published and feeds into the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and climate. |
| 1992 | Al Gore, newly elected Vice President, publishes Earth in the Balance. |
| 1995 | The IPCC's second assessment report lays groundwork for the 1997 Kyoto Agreement. |
| 1997 | The Kyoto Agreement is adopted; Gore later signs it as Vice President, though the US Senate opposes ratification. |
| 2000 | Gore loses the US presidential election and later redirects his career toward environmental campaigning. |
| 2001 | The IPCC's third assessment report further consolidates the scientific case. |
| 2006 | Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth is released. |
| 2007 | The IPCC's fourth assessment report appears; the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 is announced on 12 October and presented on 10 December. |
The Committee's own speech noted that immediately after the Nobel ceremony, the laureates were due to travel to Bali, where representatives of more than 180 countries were preparing the ground for the agreement meant to replace the Kyoto Agreement from 2012 onward.
Why does this prize matter?
The award mattered first because it put climate change, for the first time, on the list of causes the Nobel Committee treats as peace work, alongside older categories such as disarmament and human rights. In the Committee's own account, this widened public understanding of what counts as a threat to security.
It also mattered as recognition for a specific method: a continuous, government-backed scientific review process involving thousands of experts across more than a hundred countries, which the Committee suggested as a model that could be applied to other global problems such as biodiversity loss or over-fishing.
For Gore, the prize recognised that scientific findings only change behaviour once they are communicated effectively to the public and to decision-makers; his sustained campaigning, through hearings, a bestselling book and a widely seen documentary, was credited with doing exactly that.
The Committee framed the stakes starkly, warning that extensive climate changes "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources" and could increase the danger of violent conflict within and between states.
It closed its press release by stressing that action was needed immediately, "before climate change moves beyond man's control".
How does this connect to what you study?
This prize links directly to topics taught in geography and environmental studies, such as the greenhouse effect, global warming and the role of international bodies like the United Nations in coordinating scientific research.
It also links to civics and political science, through the idea of "human security", the broader notion of security that includes protection from resource scarcity, disease and disaster, not only from war between states.
Students studying climate change as a physical process can use this note alongside their science lessons, since the IPCC's reports described in the sources above stated that global warming was accelerating and, to a significant extent, man-made, which is the scientific basis the Nobel Committee relied on.
The 2007 prize is a useful real example of how scientific findings, once agreed upon through a formal international review process, can shape global politics and treaty negotiations, as happened at the Bali talks mentioned in the Committee's speech.
Quick facts for exams
The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 was awarded jointly to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore, each receiving one half of the prize, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".
The award was announced by the Norwegian Nobel Committee on 12 October 2007 and presented in Oslo on 10 December 2007. The IPCC, founded in 1988 in New York, had produced four major assessment reports by 2007.
Al Gore, born on 31 March 1948 in Washington, D.C., was the former US Vice President whose book and film had raised public awareness of climate change. The total prize amount that year was 10,000,000 Swedish kronor.
| Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
| Prize | Nobel Peace Prize 2007 |
| Laureates | Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); Albert Arnold (Al) Gore Jr. |
| Share | One half each |
| IPCC founded | 1988, New York, NY, USA |
| Gore born | 31 March 1948, Washington, D.C., USA |
| Gore's residence at award | USA |
| Citation | "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change" |
| Date announced | 12 October 2007 |
| Prize amount | 10,000,000 Swedish kronor |
Note: Source. The prize facts in this note are from the Nobel Prize's official site, nobelprize.org.
Glossary
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — a United Nations body founded in 1988 that assesses the scientific evidence on climate change through reports written and reviewed by thousands of experts.
- Norwegian Nobel Committee — the body based in Oslo that decides and announces the Nobel Peace Prize each year.
- Man-made climate change — long-term warming of the earth's climate caused mainly by human activities such as burning fossil fuels.
- Greenhouse gas — a gas, such as carbon dioxide, that traps heat in the atmosphere and contributes to global warming.
- Brundtland Report — the 1987 United Nations report Our Common Future that raised early global concern about environment and development and led to the IPCC's creation.
- Assessment report — a major periodic document in which the IPCC summarises the state of climate science; four had appeared by 2007.
- Kyoto Agreement — the 1997 international treaty aimed at reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, which Gore signed as Vice President though the US Senate did not ratify it.
- Human security — a broad idea of security that protects individuals from violence, starvation, disease and disaster, not only states from war.
- Desertification — the process by which fertile land turns into desert, often cited as a cause of resource conflict such as in the Sahel region.
- Precautionary principle — the idea that serious possible harm to the environment should be acted against even before it is fully scientifically certain.
- An Inconvenient Truth — Al Gore's 2006 documentary film explaining the evidence for global warming to a general audience.
- Climate war — the Committee's term for conflicts, such as in Darfur, where competition for resources worsened by climate change is a central underlying factor.
Common errors and misconceptions
- Misconception: The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 went only to Al Gore. Correct: It was shared equally between Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one half each.
- Misconception: The IPCC is a single laboratory or research institute. Correct: It is a review body coordinating the work of thousands of scientists and officials from over a hundred countries.
- Misconception: The prize was given for a scientific discovery. Correct: It was given for building and spreading knowledge about climate change and laying the ground for action, not for a single discovery.
- Misconception: Al Gore won the prize while he was Vice President. Correct: He received it in 2007, years after leaving office following his loss in the 2000 presidential election.
- Misconception: The IPCC was founded by Al Gore. Correct: It was founded in 1988 by the UN Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization, independently of Gore.
- Misconception: The Nobel Committee said climate change directly causes all wars. Correct: It said climate change can increase the danger of conflict by straining scarce resources, citing Darfur as an example, not that it is the sole cause of war.
- Misconception: Peace Prizes are only given for stopping wars between countries. Correct: The Committee has long used a broader idea of peace that includes human security threats such as environmental breakdown.
Exam-style questions with model answers
Q1. In what year was the IPCC founded? [1 mark]
- The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988 in New York, USA.
Q2. What share of the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 did each laureate receive? [2 marks]
- The prize was shared in two equal parts, with the IPCC receiving one half and Al Gore receiving the other half, as stated in the official prize facts.
Q3. State the official citation for the Nobel Peace Prize 2007. [2 marks]
- The citation reads: "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."
Q4. Explain what the IPCC contributed that led to the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. [4 marks]
- The IPCC produced four major assessment reports between 1990 and 2007, each building a stronger scientific case for human-caused global warming. It coordinated work by around 450 authors, 800 contributors and 2,500 scientific experts from over 130 countries, with governments also reviewing the findings. This made its conclusions a shared, internationally agreed body of knowledge rather than one group's opinion, which the Norwegian Nobel Committee described as a fundamentally innovative process of mobilising scientific knowledge through the United Nations.
Q5. Describe Al Gore's political and campaigning career as outlined by the Nobel Committee. [4 marks]
- As a young member of the US House of Representatives in the 1970s, Gore organised hearings on greenhouse-gas emissions. In 1992 he published Earth in the Balance, proposing a global plan to protect the biosphere, and as Vice President he signed the Kyoto Agreement, though the Senate did not ratify it. After losing the 2000 presidential election, he built a new career as an environmental campaigner, culminating in the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth, which the Committee credited with raising worldwide public understanding of the need for climate action.
Q6. Why did the Norwegian Nobel Committee treat climate change as a peace issue rather than purely an environmental one? [6 marks]
- The Committee explained that it has always taken a broad view of peace, extending beyond war between states to the idea of "human security", which includes protecting people from resource scarcity, disaster, disease and displacement, not only from armed attack. It argued that climate change threatens human security directly, pointing to melting Himalayan glaciers that feed water supplies for a large share of the world's population, desertification in Africa and China, and flooding risks in low-lying countries such as Bangladesh. Beyond these direct effects, the Committee argued that strained resources caused by climate change can fuel violent conflict, citing what it called the first "climate war" in Darfur and the wider Sahel belt, where competition between nomads and farmers over land and water has produced repeated clashes. It also noted that the UN Security Council had, in 2007, held its first debate explicitly linking climate change to international peace and security. On this reasoning, building scientific knowledge about climate change and pushing for political action against it, the Committee concluded, were genuine contributions to global peace.
Q7. Name two IPCC assessment reports mentioned by the Nobel Committee and what each fed into. [3 marks]
- The first assessment report, published in 1990, became one of the basic documents behind the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and climate. The second assessment report, published in 1995, laid much of the groundwork for the 1997 Kyoto Agreement.
Q8. When was the Nobel Peace Prize 2007 announced, and where was it presented? [2 marks]
- It was announced on 12 October 2007 by the Norwegian Nobel Committee and presented at the award ceremony in Oslo on 10 December 2007.
Key takeaways
- The Nobel Peace Prize 2007 was shared equally between the IPCC and Al Gore for building and spreading knowledge about man-made climate change.
- The IPCC, founded in 1988, produced four assessment reports between 1990 and 2007 that strengthened the scientific case for human-caused warming.
- Al Gore's campaigning, including his book Earth in the Balance and film An Inconvenient Truth, helped bring climate change into mainstream political debate.
- The Norwegian Nobel Committee linked environmental change to "human security", a broad idea of peace beyond war between states.
- The Committee cited Darfur and the Sahel belt as examples of conflict sharpened by resource pressure linked to desertification.
- The prize amount for 2007 was 10,000,000 Swedish kronor, shared equally between the two laureates.
- The decision came shortly before international climate talks in Bali aimed at a successor to the Kyoto Agreement.
Test yourself
Who were the two laureates of the Nobel Peace Prize 2007?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize 2007, each receiving one half.
When and where was the IPCC founded?
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was founded in 1988 in New York, NY, USA.
Where and when was Al Gore born?
Al Gore was born on 31 March 1948 in Washington, D.C., USA.
What book did Gore publish in 1992?
Al Gore published Earth in the Balance: Forging a New Common Purpose in 1992, the year he was elected Vice President.
What documentary is linked to Gore's Nobel recognition?
An Inconvenient Truth, released in 2006, is the documentary that the Committee credited with raising public awareness of climate change.
What example of climate-linked conflict did the Committee give?
The Committee pointed to Darfur and the wider Sahel belt as a region where desertification worsened conflict between nomads and farmers.
What idea did the Committee use to connect climate change with peace?
The Committee used the idea of "human security", a broad view of peace that includes protection from resource scarcity, disaster and disease.