One of the most respected general scientific journals analyzes an updated version of the Club of Rome report, which was first published more than 40 years ago, and accurately predicted the 1973 crisis. The conclusion of the authors of the modern version of the report is also not optimistic: "There is a serious risk that by 2050 we will bring the Earth's life support systems to a tipping point of no return."
On the eve of one of the most notable economic shocks of the twentieth century - the 1973 oil crisis - an influential group of researchers released a report called "The Limits to Growth", which has become a cult today.
This work, which attracted widespread public attention and caused much controversy, paints a grim picture of the future of humanity. If no action is taken, the report says, economic and population growth will deplete the planet's resources, and economic collapse is expected by 2070.
According to a group of independent researchers, who published an updated version of the report using more sophisticated analysis tools, after four decades, the report's main findings have not lost their relevance. Like the 1972 report, the current work was commissioned by the Club of Rome, which includes representatives of the liberal-minded scientific, economic and political elite and which this year marks the fiftieth anniversary of its founding (the club was founded in 1968).
The updated version of the report, released on October 17 in Rome for the club's anniversary, is a very sobering reading. Although his conclusions are not so radical, we understand from the report that humanity is in a kind of logical trap.
Scenarios in which everything goes on as usual or accelerated economic growth means that the world will not be able to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - a set of social, environmental and economic goals for 2030, the authors conclude. And even if governments were serious about enforcing “traditional” policies to achieve social goals - such as measures such as eradicating poverty and hunger and ensuring access to quality education for all - they risk overlooking environmental issues.
"There is a serious risk that by 2050 we will bring the Earth's life support systems to a tipping point of no return," the authors of the report conclude.
“The fact that we are still facing the dilemma that the Club of Rome described nearly 50 years ago is a cause for concern,” says Julia Steinberger, an environmental economist at the University of Leeds in the UK.
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Traditional policy measures are inappropriate
The original report was a quantitative analysis based on a computer model that calculated the potential outcomes of the global economy. Critics have focused mainly on the authors' assumptions about the expected reserves of natural resources.
Some economists called the report's pessimistic findings "irresponsible nonsense," while others criticized the reliability of World3, the sophisticated model the authors used to predict energy use, pollution, and population growth.
In the latest version of the report, the authors - researchers from the Stockholm Center for Sustainable Development in Sweden and the Norwegian Business School in Oslo - came to relevant conclusions based on a model of the earth system that combines socio-economic and biophysical variables with extensive historical and recent socio-economic data.
Steinberger says this model, whose elements interact over time, looks much more reliable.
The researchers found that by continuing on the path today, the world will only reach ten of the 17 SDGs by 2030. Achieving social goals through traditional policy instruments will be achieved through unsustainable or wasteful use of natural resources: water, land and energy. This means, they write, that environmental goals such as climate stabilization, pollution reduction, and biodiversity conservation are likely to be relegated to the background.
In order to prevent a scenario in which human civilization would cause irreparable damage to the planet's ecology, the authors of the report urge world leaders to turn to those policy measures that are usually considered unconventional.
According to the authors, only much more radical - in comparison with the current - economic and behavioral changes will allow the world to achieve all 17 goals set by the UN.
These measures can include immediate energy system transformations, greater use of family planning to stabilize populations, and active promotion of a more even distribution of wealth so that the richest ten percent of people on the planet receive no more than forty percent of income.
According to Steinberger, this report confirms the original findings of the Club of Rome and welcomes alternatives to an economic mainstream focused on constant growth and balance.
“Most of the original findings of the Limits to Growth are still valid,” commented Johan Rockström, a sustainability researcher from Stockholm and one of the co-authors of the report, on the publication of the report. “Scientifically, this is a satisfactory result, but for society - far from comforting."
Quirin Shiermeier