Watt-Cloutier said she had been jointly nominated for the award with former US vice president Al Gore, who won the Nobel alongside the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The tireless defender of the Arctic and Inuit rights in the face of climate change, told Canadian broadcaster CBC that she was "very pleased" that they won.

But, she conceded, "I was a little bit surprised to be honest because we had jointly been nominated ... (and) it certainly would have helped to continue to put (Arctic) issues on the map and the human dimension to it."

"In that respect I have to admit I was a little bit disappointed (not to win)."

Still, "for me, the issue has won. And in fact, our own planet Earth is a winner in all of this," she said.

Watt-Cloutier later told reporters in a conference call from her home in Iqaluit, in Canada's far north: "To give climate change such a huge focal point at this time in history is a very good sign."

She also praised Gore and the IPCC for their "tremendous work" in raising awareness about the impacts of climate change in recent years.

Born in 1953 in Kuujjuaq, in Canada's northern Nunavik region, Watt-Cloutier was raised in traditional Inuit culture for the first 10 years of her life, traveling by dog sled across the barren tundra, before boarding at schools in Nova Scotia, in Churchill, Manitoba, and eventually in Ottawa.

"For us, ice and snow represents mobility and transportation," she told AFP, explaining the plight of the Inuit faced with melting Arctic ice. "The changes are huge from the time I was a child."

Elected as president of the Inuit Circumpolar Council Canada in 1995 and again in 1998, Watt-Cloutier would become chair of the international organization (ICC) that represents the 155,000 Inuit of Canada, Greenland, Alaska and Russia in 2002.

She was instrumental, on behalf of a coalition of northern indigenous peoples, in the global negotiations that led to the 2001 Stockholm Convention ban on organic pollutants that contaminate the Arctic food chain.

In December 2005, she filed a petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights warning of the dangerous impacts of climate change in the far north.

Most recently, on March 1, 2007, she testified before the Commission during their extraordinary first hearing on the links between climate change and human rights.

That link, she opined, helped awaken the world to scientists' concerns about climate change.

"Since I launched this petition, I have had speaking invitations from around the world almost on a daily basis," she said.

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