Who has propounded the concept of 'Limit to Growth' ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, Club of Rome. 'The Limits to Growth' (1972) was commissioned by the Club of Rome, a global think tank founded in 1968 by the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and the Scottish scientist Alexander King. The study itself was carried out by a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III — using a system-dynamics computer model called World3. Feeding in the trends of the day for population, industrial output, food production, pollution and non-renewable resource use, the model concluded that if those exponential trends continued unchanged, the limits to growth on the planet would be reached within the next one hundred years, ending in a sharp and uncontrollable decline. That single report is what the phrase 'Limits to Growth' refers to, and it belongs to the Club of Rome.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) UNESCO is a United Nations specialised agency created in 1945, headquartered in Paris, whose mandate is education, science and culture — it runs the World Heritage Convention and the Man and the Biosphere Programme. It is an inter-governmental body, not an independent think tank, and it neither commissioned nor published 'The Limits to Growth'.  (c) The Brundtland Commission is the popular name of the World Commission on Environment and Development, set up by the UN in 1983 and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland of Norway. Its report 'Our Common Future' (1987) gave the standard definition of sustainable development. It came fifteen years after 'Limits to Growth' and answered it — arguing that growth and environment can be reconciled rather than that growth must stop.  (d) Agenda 21 is not a body at all and so cannot propound anything. It is the non-binding action plan for the 21st century adopted by governments at the Rio Earth Summit (UN Conference on Environment and Development) in June 1992, twenty years after the Club of Rome report.

Concept: 'The Limits to Growth' is the founding text of the limits-to-growth or 'neo-Malthusian' strand of environmental thinking. Its method was new for its time: instead of arguing verbally, the MIT team built the World3 computer model (developing Jay Forrester's earlier world models) and ran scenarios in which five variables — population, industrial output per head, food per head, pollution and non-renewable resources — interact through feedback loops. Because these variables grow exponentially while the earth's sink and source capacities are finite, most scenarios ended in 'overshoot and collapse' within about a century unless growth was deliberately slowed. The report was fiercely criticised by economists for underplaying technology, substitution and price signals, but it put carrying capacity, resource ceilings and the idea of a steady-state economy permanently on the policy agenda.

State PCS 2019 Q111 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2019 Q111 — Environment & Ecology PYQ with Answer