Gwladys and Nora Buli

OSLO (Reuters – The Nobel Peace Prize announcement will take place just three weeks ahead of world leaders meet for a climate summit. Scientists believe that this meeting could decide the fate of our planet’s future. One reason prize watchers think this year could be Greta Thunberg’s year is because of its proximity to the event.

On Oct. 8, the world’s highest-prized political award will be revealed. The winner may seem surprising, but those who closely follow the process say that it is possible to predict the outcome by looking at global issues likely to be in the mind of five members.

Global warming is a potential issue with the COP26 climate summit scheduled for November beginning in Scotland. If the world wants to avoid catastrophe, scientists see this summit as its last chance to agree on binding greenhouse gas emission reduction targets over the next 10 years.

Thunberg could be one of these. He is the Swedish climate activist and would, at 18, be the second-youngest winner after Malala Yousafzai, from Pakistan.

The committee wants to convey a message often. This will send a powerful message to COP26. It will take place between the announcement and the ceremony,” Dan Smith of Stockholm International Peace Research Institute told Reuters.

Democracy and free speech may be another major issue that the committee wants to address. The award could be given to either a respected press freedom organization, such the Committee to Protect Journalists (or Reporters Without Borders), or to an exiled Belarusian leader Sviatlana Sikhanouskaya. Or to Alexei Navalny a prisoner.

Henrik Urdal (director of Peace Research Institute Oslo) said that a win for journalism advocacy groups would be “in line with the vast debate over the importance independent reporting and fighting fake news for democratic government.”

The Nobel Prize for Navalny and Tsikhanouskaya is a nod to the Cold War when literature and peace prizes were awarded to prominent Soviet dissidents like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.

Other groups that are involved directly in fighting COVID-19 include the World Health Organization and the vaccine sharing organization COVAX. However, prize-watchers believe this may not be as likely as it seems. Last year, the U.N. World Food Programme was cited by the committee for the pandemic response.

Although any parliamentarian from any country may nominate candidates, the winning candidate in the recent years has been a Norwegian legislator who proposed the nominee.

Thunberg and Navalny were among the Norwegian legislators Reuters surveyed. Tsikhanouskaya, Thunberg and WHO are also on the lists.

SECRETS FROM THE VAULT

Secretive deliberations of the committee remain secret forever, and no minutes are taken. Other documents, such as the full list of 329 nominees for this year, remain behind an alarm door at The Norwegian Nobel Institute. They are to be released in fifty years.

Document folders are lined the walls of the vault: one for nominating, the other for sending correspondence.

The documents are a treasure trove of information for historians looking to discover how laureates arise. Most recent public documents concern the 1971 prize that Willy Brandt (Chancellor of West Germany) won for his actions to lower East-West tensions during the Cold War.

According to librarian Bjoern vangen, “The Europe that you see today is basically a legacy of those efforts.” Reuters.

According to the documents, Brandt was one of three finalists for the prize. Jean Monnet (a French diplomat and founder of the European Union) was also among them. Monnet’s creation and eventual win of the 2012 prize would require another 41 years.