Thomas Sterner is a Professor of Environmental Economics at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, whose work is focused on the design of policy instruments to deal with resource and environmental problems. Sterner has published more than a dozen books and a hundred articles on environmental policy instruments with applications to energy, climate, industry, transport economics and resource management in developing countries. He has in particular worked on the importance of fuel taxation for climate and transport policies. He has also worked on the feasibility and income distributional aspects of environmental policies. Another body of his work is focused on intertemporal discounting.
Sterner is the recipient of the Myrdal Prize, past president for the European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists (EAERE). He is also a Fellow or researcher at Resources for the Future, The Beijer Institute and Statistics Norway.
With Gunnar Köhlin, he has founded the Environment for Development Initiative and is a member of the research board of several developing country networks such as the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He has served as Chief Economist of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York and in 2015-16 he was elected guest professor at the Collège de France. Sterner was Coordinating Lead Author of chapter 15 on policy instruments in the AR5 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).