The Economy Weaving the Sky Book - The Stern Review Echoes Climate (2006)

The Economy Weaving the Sky Book - The Stern Review Echoes Climate (2006)
In 2006, the UK Treasury commissioned economist Nicholas Stern to write a report, the Stern Review, a landmark study that decried climate change as "the biggest market failure in history." Stern showed that failure to take action on global warming would result in a loss of 20% of global GDP, but that early action would cost only 1%, and warned that "failure to act is the greatest loss. His argument was an ideological shift that put environmental policy back at the center of the economy, presenting a viewpoint that sees climate change not as an external problem but as a fundamental risk to the economic structure.
Stern proposed a framework for integrating the environment into market mechanisms, including carbon pricing, an emissions trading system, and investment in low-carbon technologies. This created a new ethical and economic perspective that transformed environmental protection from a "cost" to an "investment. He also positioned environmental destruction as an "injustice" to future generations and placed sustainability at the core of political and economic legitimacy. This report became the foundation for the later Green New Deal and sustainable finance, and the starting point for 21st century thinking that "the economy breathes in the environment.