The Stern Review on the Economic Effects of Climate Change

• Published in: Population and Development Review
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Wiley 2006
• Subjects: permafrost
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00153.x; https://api.wiley.com/onlinelibrary/tdm/v1/articles/10.1111%2Fj.1728-4457.2006.00153.x; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1728-4457.2006.00153.x

In a study of the economics of climate change commissioned by the British government, released on 30 October, the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern presents a vigorously argued case for early curtailment of greenhouse gas emissions and proposes mitigation strategies that appear to offer highly favorable benefit‐cost ratios. An excerpt from the Executive Summary of the Stern Review, concerned with the nature and magnitude of the deleterious economic consequences of anticipated climate change, is printed below. The principal scientific reviews of knowledge of climate change, its consequences, and mitigation strategies are the (roughly) quinquennial reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—the work of hundreds of lead authors, subjected in turn to elaborate peer review and line‐by‐line scrutiny by interested governments. They represent a broad, though not total, expert consensus. The third IPCC assessment was issued in 2001; the fourth, already in draft, will be released next year. The Stern Review draws heavily on this scientific underpinning, but goes further than the IPCC exercise in computing economic values for the projected changes and costing out remedial policy responses. More forthright in style and emphatic in its conclusions, it reads as a resounding call to international action. The Review explores the implications of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being capped at 550ppm (parts per million), double the preindustrial level, an objective it argues is feasible. That concentration would be reached by 2050 at current emission rates, or by 2035 if emissions rise as expected. The resulting warming, it believes, would be 2‐5°C, roughly in accord with the IPCC's third‐assessment estimates (see the Documents section of PDR 27, no. 1 for the IPCC projections). The positive feedbacks identified in some recent studies, generated by processes such as release of methane from permafrost, could lead to still higher temperatures. The ...