Disasters caused by climate change

Disaster_Guardian_Oct_09

Guardian, 13 October 2009

Nobel prizes need reform

Smith School Director Sir David King is one of ten leading scientists today calling for the prestigious Nobel prizes to be reformed.

The group has written an open letter to the Nobel Foundation proposing changes to align the awards more closely with modern science and reflect new scientific challenges such as climate change.

The experts were asked to debate the Nobel prizes by New Scientist and their conclusions are published in the journal today. They say that science has changed adding “When Alfred Nobel signed his will in 1895, he could not have anticipated threats such as climate change and HIV/AIDS. Nor could he have known of the new scientific disciplines whose findings can change our world for the better.”

The scientists fear that major breakthroughs, including work that could help tackle climate change and Aids, do not fit Nobel prize criteria. To remedy that, they have suggested new prizes for environmental science and public health, and recognition for the life sciences such as ecology and behavioural science.

“The environment prize would recognise successes in promoting sustainability, mitigating climate change or reducing biodiversity losses,” the letter says. “The public health prize would recognise improvements in global health, such as the reduction or eradication of disease. We feel that these suggestions will enable the prizes to appropriately recognise future achievements, and to remain influential for another hundred years.”

In a BBC Radio interview, Sir David said the 21st century was posing ”a whole bunch of new challenges” caused by our consumption of ecosystem services – freshwater, minerals and energy for example – faster than nature could replenish them.

“We therefore have to really focus our attention on what we’re doing to the environment, on how we produce water, food and minerals, for a population of nine billion by mid-century.

“This is a new challenge and requires fresh thinking on the part of all of us including, I would suggest, the Nobel prize committee.”

Sir David said the Nobel prizes were ”the most influential prizes in the world within the domain of intellectual endeavour.” No other prize had achieved the same standing and because of of that it was ”very important we take the environmental challenges we are faced with, particicularly the question of sustainability which is the key question of 21^st Century, and see if the Nobel prize committee can’t come up with a way of adding that in.”

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, Mr Gore for raising awareness of climate change and the IPCC for proving the link between global warming and human activities.

Sir David said the peace prize was not sufficient, however. ”The Nobel peace prize itself has become a kind of catch-all,” he said. ”If there was a specific prize associated with contributions to sustainability we would have a very different sort of thing.”

Times report