Former U.S. Vice President and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Al Gore, left, and Geir Lundestad, right, director of the Norwegian Nobel Institute, board the high speed train from Oslo airport to the city center, shortly after Gore's arrival in Oslo, Friday, Dec. 7, 2007. Gore and the U.N.'s climate panel chairman, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, are to receive their shared Nobel Peace Prize award on Monday. (AP Photo/Scanpix, Bjorn Sigurdson)
Oslo (dpa) - The winners of the 2007 Nobel Peace Price Sunday called for a "strong mandate" to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at the ongoing UN climate conference meeting on the Indonesian resort island of Bali.
"What we are facing is a planetary emergency," former US vice president Al Gore said at a news conference, adding that "the challenge now is to awaken the global community now to reduce global emissions sharply."
Co-laureate Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said that "we have a clear window" to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and "have to show results by 2015."
"And this verdict is very clear," he added, referring to the scientific data the some 2,500 researchers in the IPPC have assessed and compiled in several reports.
Gore and Pachauri were Monday slated to receive their awards at a ceremony in Oslo. On Wednesday they were scheduled to make a brief stop in the Swedish capital Stockholm before heading to Bali.
Pachauri said the IPCC was "a unique undertaking and its assessments now are approved by politicians all over the world, word by word."
Gore said he hoped the Bali meeting would result in "a strong mandate to reduce emissions."
He said he was "optimistic" citing the development in the United States and all over the world of a "people power movement on one subject globally."
Gore who was defeated 2000 in a tight, controversial presidential race against George W Bush said he had "no plans to run" again but said he would not rule it out either.
Both prize winners urged children and youth to get involved in climate change issues at school and elsewhere and try to pressure adults to make changes.
The peace prize and the other Nobel awards were endowed by Swedish dynamite inventor Alfred Nobel, and are each worth 10 million kronor (1.53 million dollars).
The other Nobel prizes awarded for medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and economics are handed over in Stockholm. All the prize ceremonies are held Monday, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.
