The Nobel Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo Friday, with climate change campaigners Al Gore, pictured, and Canadian Inuit Sheila Watt-Cloutier among the favourites to win the top honour.

Former US Vice President Al Gore and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize Friday for raising awareness of the threat of climate change.

"His strong commitment, reflected in political activity, lectures, films and books, has strengthened the struggle against climate change," the citation said.

Gore, who won an Academy Award this year for his film An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, had been widely expected to win the prize.

Climate change has moved high on the international agenda this year. The UN climate panel has been releasing reports, talks are set to resume on a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, and there is concern about the melting Arctic.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee said global warming, "may induce large-scale migration and lead to greater competition for the earth's resources. Such changes will place particularly heavy burdens on the world's most vulnerable countries. There may be increased danger of violent conflicts and wars, within and between states."

Jan Egeland, a Norwegian peace mediator and former UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs, also called climate change more than an environmental issue.

"It is a question of war and peace," said Egeland, now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs in Oslo. "We're already seeing the first climate wars, in the Sahel belt of Africa." He said nomads and herders are in conflict with farmers because the changing climate has brought drought and a shortage of fertile lands.

(Xinhua News Agency, Associated Press October 12, 2007)