Club of Rome

History

Origins

In 1965, the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei gave a speech about the dramatic scientific and technological changes happening in the world. The speech was noticed by Alexander King, a British scientist who had advised the British government, and who was currently serving as Director-General for Scientific Affairs at the OECD. King arranged a meeting with Peccei. The pair shared a lack of confidence that the problems faced by the world could be solved by development and technological progress.

In April 1968, Peccei and King convened a small international group of people from the fields of academia, civil society, diplomacy, and industry met at Villa Farnesina in Rome. The background paper to set the tone of the meeting was entitled "A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope", by Austrian OECD consultant Erich Jantsch. However, the meeting was described as a "monumental flop", with discussions becoming bogged down in technical and semantic debates.

After the meeting, Peccei, King, Jantsch, and Hugo Thiemann decided to form the Club of Rome, named for the city of their meeting.

First steps

Central to the formation of the club was Peccei's concept of the problematic. It was his opinion that viewing the problems of humankind—environmental deterioration, poverty, endemic ill-health, urban blight, criminality—individually, in isolation or as "problems capable of being solved in their own terms", was doomed to failure. All are interrelated. "It is this generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the 'problematic' that inheres in our situation."

In October 1968, the OECD held a symposium in Bellagio, Italy, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, at which several new members joined the club. The symposium focused on the dangers of exponential growth—which by its nature cannot continue forever—and ended with participants signing "The Bellagio Declaration on Planning", which emphasized the need to overcome global problems through coordination.

For a brief period, the club's ideas held sway within the OECD, thanks to King's efforts in promoting the group's work. When Secretary General Thorkil Kristensen formed a group of ten science and economic experts in 1969 to study problems for modern societies, four of the ten were members of the Club of Rome.

In 1970, Peccei's vision was laid out in a document written by Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch, and Alexander Christakis. Entitled, The Predicament of Mankind; Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties: A PROPOSAL. The document would serve as the roadmap for the Limits to Growth project.

The Limits to Growth

The Club of Rome stimulated considerable public attention with the first report to the club, The Limits to Growth. Published in 1972, its computer simulations suggested that growth of production and consumption could not continue indefinitely because of either resource depletion or unmanageable levels of pollution. The 1973 oil crisis increased public concern about this problem. The report went on to sell 30 million copies in more than 30 languages, making it the best-selling environmental book in history.

Although the Club of Rome had enjoyed some influence at the OECD, their questioning of the value of growth "deepened the internal fractures within the OECD and provoked hostile reactions, leading to a revitalization of the strong pro-growth position." A 1973 booklet on the OECD's approach to environmental issues stated that the role of governments in "an acceptable human environment must now be developed in the framework of policies for economic growth". The OECD had given up on the Club of Rome, and set its course on a trajectory of unfettered growth.

1974–present

Even before The Limits to Growth was published, Eduard Pestel and Mihajlo Mesarovic of Case Western Reserve University had begun work on a far more elaborate model (it distinguished ten world regions and involved 200,000 equations compared with 150 in the Meadows model). The research had the full support of the club and its final publication, Mankind at the Turning Point, was accepted as the official "second report" to the Club of Rome in 1974. In addition to providing a more refined regional breakdown, Pestel and Mesarovic had succeeded in integrating social as well as technical data. The second report revised the scenarios of the original Limits to Growth and gave a more optimistic prognosis for the future of the environment, noting that many of the factors involved were within human control and therefore that environmental and economic catastrophe were preventable or avoidable.

In 1991, the club published The First Global Revolution. It analyses the problems of humanity, calling these collectively or in essence the "problematique". It notes that, historically, social or political unity has normally been motivated by common enemies:

[...] Again, freedom fighters, despite tribal and ideological differences, were able to find unity and strengthened patriotism in the struggle for independence against their common enemy, the colonial powers. It would seem that men and women need a common motivation, namely a common adversary against whom they can organize themselves and act together. In the [late 20th century] vacuum such motivations seem to have ceased to exist – or have yet to be found.

The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor. Some states have striven to overcome domestic failure and internal contradictions by blaming external enemies. The ploy of finding a scapegoat is as old as mankind itself—when things become too difficult at home, divert attention to adventure abroad. Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one, or else one invented for the purpose. With the disappearance of the traditional enemy, the temptation is to use religious or ethnic minorities as scapegoats, especially those whose differences from the majority are disturbing.

Can we live without enemies? Every state has been so used to classifying its neighbours as friend or foe, that the sudden absence of traditional adversaries has left governments and public opinion with a great void to fill. New enemies have to be identified, new strategies imagined, and new weapons devised.
[...]
In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.

In 2001, the Club of Rome established a think tank, called tt30, consisting of about 30 men and women, ages 25–35. It aimed to identify problems in the world and suggest approaches to addressing them, from the perspective of youth.

In 2008, the club moved its headquarters from Hamburg to Winterthur in Switzerland.

In 2018, the Club of Rome appointed its first female co-presidents. The same year, co-presidents Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker and Anders Wijkman collaborated with over 30 members to publish "Come On! Capitalism, Short-termism, Population and the Destruction of the Planet". This publication advocated for profound changes in the interactions between governments, businesses, financial systems, innovators, and families to foster sustainable planetary stewardship.