How can economics best contribute to the scientific and public debates? Professor Thomas Sterner, University of Gothenburg, together with Nicholas Stern, who wrote the The Stern Review, and Nobel laureates Thomas Schelling and Robert Solow are among the scholars who explain in a new book both how economics has changed environmental understanding and how the study of climate change has modified the economy. The book is released today at COP15.
The book, Changing Climate, Changing Economy, is released for COP15 and launched by authors Thomas Sterner and Jean-Philippe Touffut on December 8 in Copenhagen.
The authors are Michel Armatte, Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Olivier Godard, Inge Kaul, Thomas Schelling, Robert Solow, Nicholas Stern, Thomas Sterner, and Martin Weitzman. The book is edited by Jean-Philippe Touffut, Director, Cournot, Centre for Economic Studies, Paris, France.
“When economic principles are applied to a calculation that extends over several centuries for the whole World then some features become very important that we do not normally focus on. One of these is the role of relative prices which will change very drastically over long periods of history as the sectoral composition of the economy changes”, says Thomas Sterner.
He goes on to exemplify by resources that will become very scarce: coral reef, agricultural land in Bangladesh, water in parts of Africa.
“Scarcity will drive up prices and this is one of the mechanisms that explains why climate damage will be so costly”, says Thomas Sterner.
Click to see a video in French from the presentation at the Centre Cournot of the chapter "In Defence of Sensible Economics" December 2008