Club of Rome

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (April 2008)

The Club of Rome is a global think tank that deals with a variety of international political issues. It was founded in April 1968 and raised considerable public attention in 1972 with its report The Limits to Growth. The club states that its mission is "to act as a global catalyst for change through the identification and analysis of the crucial problems facing humanity and the communication of such problems to the most important public and private decision makers as well as to the general public." ^[1]

Formation

The Club of Rome was founded in April 1968 by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian industrialist, and Alexander King, a Scottish scientist. It was formed when a small international group of people from the fields of academia, civil society, diplomacy, and industry, met at a villa in Rome, Italy, hence the name.

Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch and Alexander Christakis were responsible for conceptualizing the original prospectus of the Club of Rome titled "The Predicament of Mankind." This prospectus was founded on a humanistic architecture and the participation of stakeholders in democratic dialogue. When the Club of Rome Executive Committee in the Summer of 1970 opted for a mechanistic and elitist methodology for an extrapolated future, they resigned from their positions.

The Club of Rome raised considerable public attention with its report Limits to Growth, which has sold 30 million copies in more than 30 translations, making it the best-selling environmental book in world history.^[2] Published in 1972 and presented for the first time at the International Students' Committee (ISC) annual Management Symposium in St. Gallen, Switzerland, it predicted that economic growth could not continue indefinitely because of the limited availability of natural resources, particularly oil. The 1973 oil crisis increased public concern about this problem. However, even before 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 1000 in the Meadows model). The research had the full support of the Club and the 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 predictions of the original Limits to Growth and gave a more optimistic prognosis for the future of the environment, noting that many of the factors were within human control and therefore that environmental and economic catastrophe were preventable or avoidable, hence the title.

In 1993, it published the The First Global Revolution. At that time, the Club of Rome had an informal "inner group" of six, but no corporate existence. The inner group consisted of:

• Aurelio Peccei
• Alexander King
• Hugo Thiemann, Director of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Geneva
• Max Kohnstamm (Netherlands), former Secretary General of the ECSC
• Jean Saint-Geours, Ministry of Finance in Paris
• Erich Jantsch, author of Technological Forecasting

Organization

According to its website, the Club of Rome is composed of "scientists, economists, businessmen, international high civil servants, heads of state and former heads of state from all five continents who are convinced that the future of humankind is not determined once and for all and that each human being can contribute to the improvement of our societies."

As of August 2008, the Club has two Co-Presidents, Dr. Ashok Khosla of India and Dr. Eberhard von Koerber of Germany, and two Vice-Presidents, Professor Heitor Gurgulino de Souza of Brazil and Dr. Anders Wijkman of Sweden. The Secretary-General is Martin Lees of Scotland. As of 1 January 2008 he has been responsible for the day-today operation of the Club at its headquarters in Winterthur, Switzerland. Other active members include: Benjamin Bassin, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, Juan Luis Cebrian, Orio Giarini, Talat Halman, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Javier Solana, Mugur Isărescu, Kamal Hossain, Esko Kalimo, Ashok Khosla, Martin Lees, Roberto Peccei, Maria Ramirez Ribes, Victor A. Sadovnichy, Keith Suter, Majid Tehranian, Raoul Weiler, and Mikhail Gorbachev.^{[citation needed]}

The Annual Meeting of 2005 took place in Norfolk, Virginia, at Old Dominion University. It was held for the first time with members of the young think tank tt30.

Offshoots

In 2001 the Club of Rome created tt30 as a spin-off, an anticipatory thinking youth think tank for people around the age of 30.^[3]

There are national CoR associations in many nations, including a number of European nations, USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Asian nations. These associations analyze national problems in terms of the same factors and give advice nationally to decision-makers.

Notable members

• Ghanem Nuseibeh
• Aurelio Peccei
• Hans-Peter Dürr
• Derrick de Kerckhove
• Max Kohnstamm
• David Korten
• Mihajlo D. Mesarovic
• Mugur Isărescu
• Mikhail Gorbachev
• Frederic Vester (†)
• Robert Uffen (†)
• George P. Mitchell

See also

The British science magazine New Scientist reported on 19 November 2008 a study by the research organisation CSIRO in Australia found "changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the Club of Rome's predictions".^[4]

• Futures studies
• Harlan Cleveland - DIKW
• Limits to Growth - (Memetics)
  • Authors: Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jørgen Randers, and W.W. Behrens, III.
    • W.W. Behrens, Jr. - NOAA
    • Naval Postgraduate School
  • Peak Oil (Hubbert's peak)
• The Revenge of Gaia
• Survivalism

References

External links

• Club of Rome - official website
• Analysis of "Limits to Growth" by Australian Broadcasting Corporation from 1999
• [2] - Turner G. 2008. A Comparison of The Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality. Socio-Economics and the Environment in Discussion (SEED). CSIRO Working Paper Series Number 2008-09. June 2008. ISSN 1834-5638. 52 pp.