Blog post, based on the LSE launch of The Growth Story of the 21st Century (5 November 2025).
In a nutshell. Twenty years on, Lord Stern's verdict is that the climate is changing faster and more severely than we thought in 2006, and that the Review's core argument has only grown stronger: preventing climate damage costs far less than living with its effects. His own summary at the launch was that the original conclusions were right, and are stronger today.
1. Background: how the world lost the thread
Climate change did not disappear from the news. It disappeared from the agenda. Those are different things.
Every few years a new shock takes the room. A financial crisis. A pandemic. A war in Europe. Artificial Intelligence. An election that changes who holds the budget. Each of these is serious, and none of them is an excuse that anyone should have to defend.
But Nicola Ranger, speaking at the LSE launch, described the pattern plainly: when shocks hit, political capacity and fiscal space shrink, and the climate agenda rolls back. The transition she and her colleagues expected twenty years ago to be smooth has turned out to be a process of shocks.
