Nicholas Stern Quotes

The main environmental challenge of the 21st century is poverty. When you don't know where your next meal is coming from, it's hard to consider the environment 100 years down the line.

We do not wish to impoverish the environment any further, and yet we cannot for a moment forget the grim poverty of large numbers of people. Are not poverty and need the greatest polluters?

You can't tackle climate change until you tackle poverty.

We face a dilemma because although everybody is better off than they've ever been at any time in our history, we've also got the biggest gap between the rich and the poor that we've ever had, and we've potentially got a planet which is going to go bust any day.

It is futile to seek solutions to environmental disturbances without considering them from a broad perspective that encompasses the factors underlying world poverty and the inequities within and among nations.

The biggest drag on global growth in the coming decade will be climate change and the failure to adequately deal with the consequences of poverty.

We live on a planet of limited resources - an abstract notion for some of the world's population, but for many of the poorest and most vulnerable, those limits are all too real.

From a planning perspective, economic degradation begets environmental degradation, which begets social degradation.

The environmental movement could do a better job incorporating the message about the connection between poverty and environmental degradation, and building that message at the grassroots level.

Poor people of all colors are getting poorer and our communities are getting more toxic. There is a misconception that to grow our economy we will have to do business as usual, because cleaning up the environment, mitigating climate change is just too costly. Well, I say the business of poverty is just too expensive a bill for humanity to pay any longer.

We already have the statistics for the future: the growth percentages of pollution, overpopulation, desertification. The future is already in place.

We are living in the 21st century, and children are dying of hunger, so how do we fight it?

Wealth and vegetation go together, and that exacerbates environmental injustice. The poor bear the burden of degraded environments.

Climate change is destroying our path to sustainability. Ours is a world of looming challenges and increasingly limited resources. Sustainable development offers the best chance to adjust our course.

The Industrial Age is not sustainable. It's not sustainable in ecological terms, and it's not sustainable in human terms.

It's easy for people in an air-conditioned room to continue with the policies of destruction of Mother Earth. We need instead to put ourselves in the shoes of families in Bolivia and worldwide that lack water and food and suffer misery and hunger.

We are at risk of turning over to the next generation a worse life than we have had.

It is pretty ironic that the so-called 'least advanced' people are the ones taking the lead in trying to protect all of us, while the richest and most powerful among us are the ones who are trying to drive the society to destruction.

It is not possible to have a strong, functioning business in a world of increasing inequality, poverty, and climate change.

To me, what's really important about the Green New Deal isn't, like, one of the elements of it: it's the concept. It's the concept that we have a national emergency commensurate with a depression or a war. And then the second part of it, the concept that, in rising to meet that challenge, there's a ton of economic opportunity.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

Ending poverty and ensuring sustainability are the defining challenges of our time. Energy is central to both of them.

All our efforts to defeat poverty and pursue sustainable development will be in vain if environmental degradation and natural resource depletion continue unabated.

Those who fail to see that population growth and climate change are two sides of the same coin are either ignorant or hiding from the truth. These two huge environmental problems are inseparable and to discuss one while ignoring the other is irrational.