This special issue of Environmental and Resource Economics was originally intended to be an 'adversarial collaboration' between an author of the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change (SD, contributing to Stern, 2007), and a critic (DJM, in Maddison, 2007). However, it is testament to the vitality of the discipline that our agenda for this issue has moved on. Rather than convening a symposium on the merits of the Stern Review (of which there have been several, in for instance Climatic Change, the Journal of Economic Literature, the Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, and World Economics), we collect together what are in our view some of the best examples of new economic research on climate change. Taken together, they look beyond the debate about the Stern Review and offer important new insights for the design of future policy.