

Failing to act on the grave threat posed by climate change devalues the lives of future generations and amounts to unacceptable “discrimination by date of birth”, according to the influential economist Lord Stern.

Speaking at an international meeting in Rome on environmental justice and climate change attended by senior Vatican officials, Stern said that the “moral arguments” for action to combat climate change were overwhelming.

“Discounting future welfare or lives means weighting the welfare of lives of future people lower than lives now, irrespective of consumption and income levels, purely because their lives lie in the future,” he said. “This is discrimination by date of birth, and is unacceptable when viewed alongside notions of rights and justice.”



Stern is the former chief economist of the World Bank, who authored the influential 2006 Stern review commissioned by the then UK chancellor Gordon Brown. It found that ignoring climate change would eventually damage economic growth, also said that global warming presented huge potential risks related to mass migration and conflict. Stern is now the chair of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and president of the British Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

“We live and work where we do in large measure, because of where rivers, shores, and ports are located ... climate change could radically alter all of that,” he said.

He added: “The dislocation and damage to lives and livelihoods of such rapid and large climate change would be immense with hundreds of millions, probably billions, having to migrate, resulting in the likelihood of widespread conflict and loss of life.”

Lord Stern offered praise to Pope Francis, saying that the Argentine pontiff had shown “extraordinary leadership” with the publication of his encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si, which said action on global warming represented “one of the principal challenges facing humanity in our day”.

The conference on Thursday at the Istituto Patristico Augustinianum, the pontifical university, comes just weeks before Pope Francis is due to make his first visit to the United States, where he is due to give a highly anticipated speech before the United Nations on 25 September.

The pope is expected to make his case for climate change ahead of the UN’s Paris summit in December, at which Stern said it was imperative that governments act on the “gap between current ambitions and the goal of limiting global warming to no more than 2 centigrade degrees”.

Stern said that the pledges that had been made so far for 2030 indicate that global annual emissions that year will be about 55 to 60bn tonnes of carbon-dioxide-equivalent, an “important improvement” against the future figure under the status quo, with emissions of 65bn tonnes or more.

In August, Stern hit back against complaints by business groups and some political leaders who have suggested that climate action would slow economic growth.



“To portray them as in conflict is to misunderstand economic development and the opportunities that we now have to move to the low-carbon economy,” he told an audience of ambassadors in Paris. “To pretend otherwise is diversionary and indeed creates an ‘artificial horse race’ which can cause real damage to the prospects for agreement.”