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It’s been almost a week since the news broke, but I’m still processing the myriad implications of the decision to jointly award the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize to the former US vice-president Al Gore and the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There’s no doubt in my mind that the prize should be read as a political provocation and that it heralds a seismic shift in the way we think about the environment, media, and the global political landscape.

In the wake of this prize, the debate around climate change is bound to transition from the realm of science to that of sociology. Moreover, conversations about the democratization of knowledge and the impact of media on activism will earn credibility and be perceived as more than millennial jargon. Gore, after all, has won this prize for managing to spread awareness about and spark interest in climate change on an unprecedented scale, using a variety of visual media to facilitate his mission. His efforts have debunked the well-established myth that people are insular and complacent. What he has proved, instead, is that exposure to accurate and accessible information can motivate even the most unlikely candidates to action in the public interest.

In the political sphere, meanwhile, the prize codifies the global swing from the right to the left. On an obvious level, applauding Gore in such an extravagant manner is a way to champion liberal, progressive politicians who advocate for green policies. Simultaneously, the Nobel Peace Prize seems to be an admonishment of Bush’s refusal to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol and impose mandatory caps on greenhouse gas emissions. It is also a slap on the wrist of right-wing Christian evangelicals – in other words, the Republican voter base – who continue to deny the validity of scientific evidence for global warming.

Even if I strip away the lofty political implications of the prize as outlined above, a provocative message is left to contend with: climate change is an urgent reality that threatens human security and society and can only be addressed through global consensus. This message hits far closer to home than most of us realize. Soon after the prize was announced, I was able to speak with Adil Najam, the Associate Professor of International Negotiation and Diplomacy at the Tufts University Fletcher School and a member of the award-winning IPCC panel. Najam was a convening author involved in the production of ‘Climate Change 2007’, the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report on environmental issues, that is, the document that earned the panel the coveted Nobel prize. Previously, Najam was the lead author of the ‘Mitigation of Climate Change’ section of the Third Assessment Report, which was released by the IPCC in 2001. Najam’s major contribution to the IPCC documents has been to emphasize, along with a host of other scholars and scientists, that sustainable development is one of the best tactics through which to tackle climate change. According to Najam, the Pakistani government and public, as much as anyone in the West, should see this prize as a wake-up call.

“You can’t talk about the climate without talking about poor people,” says Najam, pithily highlighting one of the main thrusts of the IPCC’s latest report. He points out that when people think of climate change, it’s often in the context of cuddly animals becoming endangered and riverbeds drying up. “It’s time for environmentalism to have a new emphasis. Climate change should make people think about Bengali fishermen who are denied a livelihood and farmers throughout the Third World who find their land yields decreasing.” In other words, Najam, like many of the authors of this IPCC report, believes that the conversation about climate change should no longer be framed as a scientific debate. Rather, it should be re-cast as an issue of basic human rights.

The issues that Najam raises here are exactly those that have been highlighted in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. According to him, sections about the impact of climate change on people, their livelihood, and security, have been amongst the most controversial in previous IPCC reports. Apparently, contributing authors felt that the hard science of climate change was being diluted by the sociological terminology of the developmental sector. This tension between science and society in the context of climate change seems to have been resolved in the IPCC report’s latest incarnation.

Indeed, ‘Climate Change 2007’ seems primed to discuss the social ramifications of climate change as it extricates the conversation from the quagmire of scientific debate. According to Najam, the fourth report avers that there is no longer any scientific uncertainty about climate change and that all evidence does indeed lead to the conclusion that the climate is changing, and that too with drastic consequences. Once this point of contention is shelved, the assessment goes on to state that the most significant and immediate impact of climate change will be on people who are already the poorest and most vulnerable.

Najam makes the IPCC’s conclusion even more pertinent within the Pakistani context. He is well-positioned to comment on the subject, having served on the team that first drafted the country’s National Conservation Strategy in conjunction with IUCN – The World Conservation Union over a decade ago. Najam is quick to praise IUCN as well as the Sustainable Development Policy Institute for their fine work on environmental issues and sustainable development initiatives. But he also points out that on a government level, “action will lag behind the realization that climate change is a real problem.” Najam posits that state actors are caught in an either/or conundrum, for when they talk about climate change, “they think that you can either save the environment or work towards development and economic growth.”

Najam points out that this pick-and-choose philosophy is a clear fallacy and argues that thanks to sustainable development initiatives, developing countries can enjoy both economic growth as well as green peace. He illustrates his claims with a compelling example: “the best way to facilitate growth in Karachi would be to implement a mass transit system. Incidentally, the single-most environmentally friendly action that Karachi can take is to implement a mass transit system.” Unfortunately, Najam believes that the government has not been able to translate this idea of sustainable development to the Pakistani public. “Having smog,” he insists, “is not development.”

No doubt, climate change is an equally pressing issue from Karachi to Kinshasa, Oslo to Omaha. The 2007 Nobel Peace Prize emphasizes this reality in a progressive and provocative way. Yet there are already lessons to be learned from the awarding of the prize. Since the Nobel committee’s announcement, the conversation about climate change has been hijacked by speculations about whether or not Gore will run for the American presidency next year. US politics should not be allowed to trump the environmental emergency that threatens people – especially those who are already disenfranchised – throughout the world. What’s at stake in this debate is not Gore, it’s the globe as we know it.