The Limits of the Stern Review for Climate Change Policy-making For the British Ecological Society Bulletin The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was published by the UK 2006

Abstract:  orchestrated media campaign, spearheaded by the British Prime Minister and the Chancellor, in the week before five thousand climate change negotiators and actors congregated in Nairobi for the 12 th Session of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The timing of the report and the authority the two most senior figures in British politics endowed it with was not accidental. Nor was the choice of the lead author, Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank. The review therefore carried the imprimateur (even if by association) of that most establishment of financial institutions and, by being commissioned by the Treasury, the approval of another one. The Stern Review is a policy document, written by a team of civil servants, speaking to a very specific policy audience and it must be understood on those terms. It also draws upon a large mountain of submitted evidence from independent researchers across the UK and many countries further afield. The report therefore has cache in three of the circles of institutionalised power ? politics, economics and science.