GoKawiilThe Growth Story of the 21st Century: The Economics and Opportunity of Climate Action Nicholas Stern LSE Press (2025)
As we breach 1.5 °C, we must replace temperature limits with clean-energy targets
It is a dark time for climate policy and global affairs. Wars in Ukraine, the Gaza Strip and now Iran, as well as the domestic and international policy and trade agendas of US President Donald Trump’s administration, are diverting attention from efforts to cut greenhouse-gas emissions. Momentum for mitigating climate change is now in retreat, as it was after the 2008 global financial crisis.
Economist Nicholas Stern pushes against that tide in his latest book. The Growth Story of the 21st Century is drawn from lectures at the London School of Economics in 2024 and builds on his earlier works in an attempt to reinvigorate worldwide efforts to limit global warming.
Stern’s 2006 report for the UK government, The Economics of Climate Change, is arguably the most influential work on that topic, both because of its content and the fierce debate that it prompted. The report, and his 2016 book Why Are We Waiting?, pushed the case for immediate and aggressive efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, based mostly on the argument that it is cheaper to decarbonize than it is to deal with the potentially catastrophic costs of climate change.
Climate change is speeding up — the pace nearly doubled in ten years
The Growth Story reiterates that point. It also repeats Stern’s critiques of the mainstream economics community, which he argues has oversimplified climate change, downplayed its risks and misleadingly portrayed climate action as being incompatible with economic growth. But the book’s main contribution and focus is on how a new ‘clean’ economy, constructed around sustainability and cooperation, can provide a more efficient, prosperous and healthy society.
The case Stern makes for sustainable development is not new; others have made similar arguments in the past. What sets the book apart is its breadth, accessibility and the practical prescriptions for reform. Rather than hiding behind abstraction, The Growth Story provides a well-defined vision of what sustainable development might look like and how it might be achieved.
Promise of a clean economy
Stern’s vision is laid out in four parts. Part one lays the foundations by introducing sustainable development and Stern’s preferred definition of it: maintenance of physical, human, natural and social capital so that future generations have opportunities that are at least as good as the current generation has. It then describes the existing international climate-policy frameworks and how they have evolved, the basics of climate science and the case for urgent decarbonization.
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