Former United States vice-president Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the Norwegian Nobel committee has said.

Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri is the chairman of the IPCC, the influential body established by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme, to investigate global warming and its consequences for Earth.

The Nobel committee, in a citation, said, the two were awarded "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."

Dr Pachauri, who has been the IPCC's chairman since April 2002, has a double PhD from North Carolina State University, Raleigh, USA, in industrial engineering and economics. He has headed The Energy Research Institute (formerly the Tata Energy Research Institute) in New Delhi since 1981, first as director, and since April 2001 as director-general.

Gore, who was the vice-president in the Clinton administration and who lost a controversial presidential poll to US President George W Bush [Images] in 2000, made the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth, after which he was seen as a champion of environmental issues and climate change.

The Rediff interview: Dr R K Pachauri on climate change

2007's other winners:
Doris Lessing bags Nobel Prize for Literature
2 Americans, Briton win Medicine Nobel

Photograph: Torsten BlackwoodAFP/Getty Images