29 January 2026 – The room was full, the symbolism unmistakable. When the Club of Rome held its first official conference in China in Suzhou in 2025, themed “Earth–Humanity Reconciliation”, it marked more than a logistical milestone. It was a moment of recognition: Asia was no longer just part of the global audience for the Club of Rome’s ideas, it had become a central arena where those ideas would be tested, reshaped and carried forward.
A relationship decades in the making
Yet this moment did not emerge from nowhere. The Club of Rome’s relationship with Asia stretches back decades, stitched together through unexpected alliances, intellectual friendships, and historical accidents. One early thread leads to Aurelio Peccei himself. As Deputy Manager of FIAT’s aircraft manufacturing in wartime China, Peccei witnessed the factory he helped build destroyed — yet, thanks to a decision authorised by Madame Chiang Kai-shek, he secured full compensation. It was this funding that later helped Peccei launch the Club of Rome.
In the 1970s and 80s, Peccei continued building bridges — speaking with Indira Gandhi and exchanging ideas with Japanese economist Saburo Okita and Prime Minister Eisaku Satō. Soedjatmoko, a prominent Indonesian diplomat, would later join the Club of Rome himself. Even the organisation’s survival depended at times on support from Asia. Former Co-President Anders Wijkman recalls a Chinese entrepreneur stepping in with critical funding during a moment of crisis in the 2010s. And Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan led the organisation as President from 2001 to 2007, followed with Ashok Kosala from India as co-president from 2007 to 2012, grounding it in yet another Asian intellectual tradition.
Why the 2010s became the turning point
The shift in this decade was driven not only by relationships, but by global context. After the 2008 financial crisis exposed fragility in Western economic systems, Asia demonstrated far greater resilience. China’s rapid industrial rise, India’s demographic weight, South Korea’s green growth agenda and Japan’s circular economy conversations, together they signalled a rebalancing of global power. If the world’s economic centre of gravity was moving east, it made sense for the Club of Rome’s intellectual centre of gravity to follow.
But expansion is never just geographic. It is cultural. It changes the tone of a conversation.
Forecasts, scenarios and the cultural meaning of the future
One unexpected window into this shift came through a comment by Jorgen Randers, co-author of The Limits to Growth. Randers said that his later book, 2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years, became unexpectedly popular in China and Japan. The book offers a single, clear forecast: humanity will respond too slowly to avoid deep climate disruption, yet just fast enough to prevent full collapse. It is neither warning nor open-ended scenario, but a firm prediction.
Why would such a deterministic outlook resonate more strongly in East Asia than the scenario-based approach of The Limits to Growth? The difference may lie in how cultures relate to uncertainty, authority and time.
Different civilisations, different relationships with time
In the West, intellectual debate often values conditionality such as the humility of saying “we do not know.” Different futures can be imagined, debated and negotiated. A model with multiple scenarios feels honest and democratic.
But in many East Asian contexts, long-term thinking is embedded in governance and culture. Confucian traditions emphasise continuity across generations. Taoist thinking encourages observing the direction of change rather than resisting it. Buddhism teaches that consequences unfold gradually and inevitably. In such a worldview, a forecast does not feel presumptuous, it feels responsible.
Authority also plays a role. In some Asian societies, when experts speak about existential risks, audiences expect clarity, not ambiguity. A forecast is not a command, it is a signal.
And, perhaps most importantly, climate disruption is not future tense in Asia. It is lived experience: floods, heatwaves, polluted air, damaged coastlines. When Randers writes as if the future has momentum, he describes what many communities already feel.
From audience to co-authors
As the Club of Rome deepened its work in Asia, the exchange became reciprocal. The organisation did not simply bring ideas about planetary limits; it discovered philosophical frameworks that had long grappled with balance, restraint, and relational thinking. Systems thinking — once a radical intellectual frame — found resonance in cultures already familiar with interdependence.
By the time the Suzhou conference opened its doors, the relationship had shifted. Asia was no longer a region to engage, it was a region helping define what global systemic transformation could mean.
A future written together
The story of the 2010s, then, is not one of a Western organisation expanding outward. It is a story of reconnection, a recognition that the future will not be shaped by one civilisation’s worldview but by a dialogue between many.
The next chapter is still unfolding. But one thing is clear: the Club of Rome’s future — and perhaps the world’s — will depend on how well we learn not only to share solutions, but to share imagination.
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