Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change: Executive Summary

How the text on Reports that Matter was made, and where it still falls short of the published report. Nothing has been rewritten. Where we know the text differs from the published report, this page says so.

Last reviewed 8 November 2026.

The edition

• Source: the Executive Summary (full) of Stern Review: The Economics of Climate Change, the independent review led by Sir Nicholas Stern for the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Prime Minister, published by HM Treasury on 30 October 2006: HM Treasury's PDF of its "pre-publication edition", 27 A4 pages, SHA-256 992ad24f…7474, kept in the report's repository. HM Treasury's website of the time is held by the UK Government Web Archive; our copy is the Wayback Machine's capture of the same file, which never changed while HM Treasury published it (2006 to 2013).
• Licence: Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. The PDF prints no copyright line of its own; the Review was carried out and published by HM Treasury, and The National Archives states that Crown copyright material in the UK Government Web Archive may be reused under the Open Government Licence. The figures' data belong to the sources each figure names; the figures are not reproduced in the text (the image at the head of the report's landing page is a crop of Figure 1, the Review's own chart).
• Covers: the Executive Summary only. The full report (27 chapters in six parts, a postscript and annexes, about 700 pages) is not here yet. The book published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 is a separate edition and is not used.
• Size: about 12,000 words in 211 paragraphs and list items, with 5 footnotes.

How the text was read

• Born-digital, so the words are the PDF's own. The PDF was made from Microsoft Word; its text layer is clean and no OCR is involved. About 95% of the PDF's words are in the text here; the rest are the running head on every page and the words drawn inside four charts (below).
• Page numbers are the printed ones, roman throughout: i on the first page to xxvii on the last, one for each page of the PDF.
• The key findings. The summary sets its main findings in bold italic, each above the paragraphs that argue it ("The scientific evidence points to increasing risks of serious, irreversible impacts from climate change...", p.iii). All 27 are served in bold italic, as printed. They are paragraphs, not headings: the report's only heading is "Executive Summary".
• Figures. The summary prints five figures in shaded boxes. Each one's title, caption and "Source:" line are served as text. The charts themselves are not: in Figures 1 to 4 (pp.iv, v, xii and xv) the labels, axes and legends are text in the PDF, and are left out rather than run into the prose as fragments; Figure 5 (p.xx) is a picture.
• Footnotes. All 5 notes are linked from their markers. Four markers are printed as small raised digits run into the word before ("(ppm) CO2 1", "IPCC 20012"); they were set by hand from the printed page, because the PDF raises the "2" of every "CO2" in the same way.
• Corrections. Three compounds broken over a line end are joined ("peer-reviewed", "co-benefits", "flood-resistant"), each checked against the page image. Seventeen words the review queue flagged as possible misreadings ("CO2e", "4CMR", "Barnett" and others) were checked and are as printed.
• Checked against the page. Eight pages were read line by line against the page images (the figure pages, the notes and the findings); six match exactly, and the two that do not are listed below.

Known limitations

• The figures are not shown. Figure 2, which sets the impacts expected at each level of warming (food, water, ecosystems, extreme weather, abrupt change) against the stabilisation levels, is one of the summary's best-known pages and is only described by its title and caption here. Read it in the PDF (p.v).
• Figure 1's title sits at the foot of page iii. It is printed at the head of page iv, but the text here runs it on to the end of the paragraph before ("...exceeding 2°C. Figure 1 Greenhouse-gas emissions in 2000, by source"): the "C." of "2°C." is read as an initial, which normally carries a sentence over the page.
• Subscripts are not shown. "CO2e" and "GtCO2e" are printed with a subscript 2; the text here sets them on the line.
• The rest of the Review is not here yet, including its Summary of Conclusions and the chapters the summary cites ("see Box 4.2").

Reporting a problem

If you find a place where the text here differs from the PDF, please open an issue with the paragraph's link and what the page prints.