26. October 2007 17:00
IPCC’s Nobel Peace Prize Win underlines International Collaboration spirit, ESF involvement
The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has not only demonstrated a remarkable commitment to the dedication of the worldwide experts’ effort into climate change research it has also highlighted the spirit of collaboration that has been avidly embraced by the European Science Foundation (ESF) since 1974.
"This Prize confers honours to the whole climate change community and recognizes the importance of disseminating our scientific knowledge. It values scientific research and its role in our society,” said Dr. Didier Hauglustaine, Science Officer in the ESF’s Life, Earth and Environmental Sciences (LEE (formerly LESC)) Unit and lead author of the last two IPCC assessment reports.
Through its various programmes and activities, the ESF has contributed to the effort of better understanding of the climate system, its past and future evolutions, and its link with humankind. Among several others, programmes such as EUROCLIMATE, BOREAS, EPICA, EURODIVERSITY have directly contributed to the research and education on global climate change. Several researchers, who are actively involved in LEE (formerly LESC), are lead authors in the last IPCC’s Working Group I assessment report.
Hauglustaine is the scientific coordinator at ESF for the EUROCORES programmes EuroMARC (Challenges of Marine Coring Research), TOPO-EUROPE (4-D Topography Evolution in Europe: Uplift, Subsidence and Sea level Change) and EUROMARGINS (Processes at the Passive Continental Margins). Jean Jouzel from the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement (LSCE), Dominique Raynaud from the Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Géophysique de l'Environnement (LGGE), and Thomas Stocker from the University of Bern were part of the EPICA (European Programme for Ice Coring in Antarctica) research network. Jouzel was also a Core Group member of the ESF Standing Committee for Life, Earth and Environmental Sciences from 1995 to 2000. Eystein Jansen from the University of Bergen is the project leader within EUROMARC. Filippo Giorgi from the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Trieste is involved in the MedCLIVAR project and Martin Heimann from the Max-Planck Institut für Biochemie was involved in SIBAE (Stable Isotopes in Biospheric-Atmospheric Exchange). Jouzel and Giorgi are the Vice-chair of IPCC Working Group I.
The IPCC was created almost 20 years ago to respond to growing concern about the risk of anthropogenic climate change. The IPCC assessment reports are written by teams of recognized experts in their field from around the world. They represent relevant disciplines as well as differing scientific perspectives. The First Assessment Report of 1990 was submitted to the UN General Assembly, which responded by formally recognizing that climate change required global action and launched the negotiations that led to the adoption of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The IPCC Plenary will meet in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the fourth volume of its "Climate Change" assessment report. This meeting represents the final step in integrating and presenting the enormous amounts of scientific information contained in this report and in the summary for policy makers explicitly targeted to policymakers. The Synthesis Report will be launched on 17 November 2007.
“ESF wishes to contribute with a strong portfolio of activities to a better understanding of global change and its impact, and these activities were fortunate to have leading European researchers involved,” commented ESF Chief Executive Dr. John Marks, who is also the chair of the first ESF Forward Look “Earth System Science: Global Problems, Global Science - Europe‘s future role in global change research” which was published in 2003.
Other Nobel Prizes
ESF’s association with this year’s Nobel Prize doesn’t just end there. Two other prominent winners for the prestigious award also have a long history with the organization.
Gerhardt Ertl, professor emeritus at the Fritz-Haber Institute in Berlin, was awarded the honour in science for his studies on the reactions between chemicals and solid surfaces. Ertl was on the ESF’s Standing Committee for Physical and Engineering Sciences (PEN (formerly PESC)) from 1995 to 1998. He was one of two German members to serve on PEN (formerly PESC) when it was established in 1995. His work laid the foundations for an entire field of modern research known as surface chemistry, which describes how individual atoms and molecules behave when they come into contact with pure surfaces.
Meanwhile Albert Fert, a French physicist and one of the discoverers of giant magnetoresistance which brought about a breakthrough in gigabyte hard disks, was awarded the Nobel prize (along with Peter Gruenberg) for physics participated in the NSIT (NanoSciences and the long term evolution of Information Technology) Forward Look in April 2005. Fert is currently professor at Université Paris-Sud in Orsay and scientific director of a joint laboratory ('Unité mixte de recherche') between the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (National Scientific Research Centre) and Thales Group.
Media contact:
- Mr. Thomas LauE-Mail
