Friday January 06, 2006

Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update : A Synopsis

mnforsustain.org :

The signs are everywhere around us:

* Sea level has risen 10-20 cm since 1900. Most non-polar glaciers are retreating, and the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice is decreasing in summer.

* In 1998 more than 45 percent of the globe's people had to live on incomes averaging $2 a day or less. Meanwhile, the richest one-fifth of the world's population has 85 percent of the global GNP. And the gap between rich and poor, is widening.

* In 2002, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimated that 75 percent of the world's oceanic fisheries were fished at or beyond capacity. The North Atlantic cod fishery, fished sustainably for hundreds of years, has collapsed, and the species may have been pushed to biological extinction ...

These are symptoms of a world in overshoot, where we are drawing on the world's resources faster than they can be restored, and we are releasing wastes and pollutants faster than the Earth can absorb them or render them harmless. We've been warned before. More than 30 years ago, a book called The Limits to Growth created an international sensation. Commissioned by the Club of Rome, an international group of businessmen, statesmen, and scientists, The Limits to Growth was compiled by a team of experts from the U.S. and several foreign countries.

Using system dynamics theory and a computer model called "World3," the book presented and analyzed 12 scenarios that showed different possible patterns - and environmental outcomes - of world development over two centuries from 1900 to 2100. The World3 scenarios showed how population growth and natural resource use interacted to impose limits to industrial growth, a novel and even controversial idea at the time. In 1972, however, the world's population and economy were still comfortably within the planet's carrying capacity.

Now in a new study, Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update, the authors have produced a comprehensive update to the original Limits, in which they conclude that humanity is dangerously in a state of overshoot.

While the past 30 years has shown some progress, including new technologies, new institutions, and a new awareness of environmental problems, the authors are far more pessimistic than they were in 1972. Humanity has squandered the opportunity to correct our current course over the last 30 years, they conclude, and much must change if the world is to avoid the serious consequences of overshoot in the 21st century.

See also :

1. The struggle against ourselves
2. Too many people in nature's way
3. The Climax of Humanity

(2006-01-06 15:29:11 SGT) [Env] Permalink

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