Global collapse predictions confirmed

The Club of Rome’s breakthrough scientific report Limits to Growth, released in 1972, predicted that if then existing trends continued, the global population would decline by as much as one-third by 2100. The report describes computer-modelled estimates of population changes, industrial growth, pollution, food production and resource depletion.

In most of the scenarios, a phenomenon the authors called “overshoot and collapse” occurred – an unsustainable growth in resource consumption leading to a catastrophic decline in industrial production sometime in the 21st century.

At the time, conservative commentators scoffed at the modelling, likening the report to crying wolf. Again in 2002, Foreign Policy claimed it belonged in the “dustbin of history”.

Last month, researchers at the University of Melbourne published a study showing that the book’s predictions match, nearly identically, the data for the 40 years since its release. Their findings also align with the fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released earlier this year. The IPCC, though often conservative in its estimates, concluded that there is a high likelihood of extreme weather events, such as heat waves, flooding and cyclones. It predicted that many populated areas may become uninhabitable due to the impact of climate change.

Capitalism’s need for rapacious growth lies at the heart of impending ecological catastrophe. That is why capitalism’s ideological defenders have been the shrillest in denouncing the predictions of works such as Limits to Growth. Avoiding “overshoot and collapse” would require the reorganisation of production as part of a revolutionary challenge to the profit system.

[Damian Ridgwell is the National Union of Students environment officer.]