The Stern Review: an assessment of its methodology

CONTENTS

Preliminaries
Preface, Abbreviations and explanations, Summary

1 Introduction
1.1 Reaction to the Stern Review
1.2 A global externality
1.3 Outline of the paper

2 The science of climate change
2.1 The greenhouse effect
2.2 Stern and the effects of anthropogenic emissions
2.3 Summary

3 Damages (and benefits) from climate change
3.1 Impact on physical, biological and human systems
3.2 Modelling of the costs of climate change
3.3 Summary

4 Mitigation costs
4.1 Resource cost approach
4.2 Macroeconomic modelling approach
4.3 Summary and conclusions

5 Aggregating costs and benefits
5.1 Discounting over time
5.2 Treatment of risk and uncertainty
5.3 Equity weighting
5.4 Aggregating the Review’s estimates
5.5 Summary

6 Climate change policy
6.1 Policy objective
6.2 Mitigation policy
6.3 Adaptation policy
6.4 International collective action
6.5 Summary

A Discount rates
A.1 Investment and consumption sourcing
A.2 Prescriptive versus descriptive approaches

References