The Limits to Growth+50
2022 marked the 50th anniversary of the Club of Rome’s landmark report, ‘The Limits to Growth’. This report – first published on 2 March 1972 – was the first to model our planet’s interconnected systems and to make clear that if growth trends in population, industrialisation, resource use and pollution continued unchanged, we would reach and then overshoot the carrying capacity of the Earth at some point in the next one hundred years.
Some fifty years on, the call for a change in direction was more urgent than ever. The report’s modelling was remarkably accurate and prescient as the world declares the climate emergency to be real and global ecosystems to be at breaking point. Fifty years offered an excellent opportunity to look back, and forward, at the trends it examined and listen to leading international thought leaders, scientists and politicians on how we create a new critical framework for living and thriving within the limits on Planet Earth.
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