share the honor with Al Gore for their work on climate change, the spokeswoman said. "It was a surprise," said Carola Traverso Saibante of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists. "We would have been happy even if he had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue."
The IPCC, which was set up in 1988, has produced scientific studies on the risk of human-induced climate change.
Earlier this year the panel forecast that all regions of the world will change from climate warming and that a third of the Earth's species would vanish if global temperatures continue to rise until they are 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average temperature in the 1980s-90s.
"Decisive action in the next decade can still avoid some of the most catastrophic scenarios the IPCC has forecast," said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official.
He urged consensus from the United States and other countries in tackling the challenge.
