UPPSC 2019 Prelims GS Paper-I · Question 111 of 150

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.

• (b)UNESCO — 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)Brundtland Commission — 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 — 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.

'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.

Four sustainability landmarks are constantly shuffled in prelims questions, and the way to keep them straight is by date and by type. 1972 belongs to the Club of Rome's 'Limits to Growth' (and, the same year, to the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment). 1983-87 belongs to the Brundtland Commission and 'Our Common Future'. 1992 belongs to the Rio Earth Summit, which produced Agenda 21, the UNFCCC and the CBD. UNESCO belongs to none of these; it is a UN agency that gets inserted as filler. Note also the type of each option: a think tank, a UN agency, a commission and a document — only two of the four are bodies that could 'propound' anything, which narrows the field before you even recall the date.

• 'The Limits to Growth' was published in 1972 for the Club of Rome; authors Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William W. Behrens III of MIT
• The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King and takes its name from the city where it first met
• The study used the World3 system-dynamics model and tracked population, industrial output, food, pollution and non-renewable resources
• Its central conclusion: on unchanged trends the planet's limits would be reached within the next hundred years, causing overshoot and decline
• Follow-up volumes by the same team — 'Beyond the Limits' (1992) and 'Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update' (2004) — revisited the scenarios
• Not to be confused with 'Our Common Future' (1987, Brundtland Commission) or Agenda 21 (1992, Rio Earth Summit)

• Crediting 'Limits to Growth' to the Brundtland Commission because both are famous environment reports — they are fifteen years and one argument apart
• Treating Agenda 21 as an organisation; it is a document adopted at Rio in 1992
• Confusing the two 1972 milestones: the Stockholm Conference (inter-governmental) and 'Limits to Growth' (a private think-tank report)

UPPSC asks it as a straight 'who propounded / which body published' one-liner or as a chronology of environment milestones, while UPSC prefers statement pairs that test whether you can tell what the Club of Rome did and did not do (it wrote 'Limits to Growth' in 1972; it did not propose the SDGs).

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The report 'Our Common Future' (1987), which popularised the definition of sustainable development, was produced by:

  • (a)Club of Rome
  • (b)World Commission on Environment and Development (Brundtland Commission)
  • (c)UNESCO
  • (d)Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

  Answer(b) the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland — hence the name Brundtland Report.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The computer model used in 'The Limits to Growth' (1972) to simulate the interaction of population, industrial output, food, pollution and resources was called:

  • (a)World3
  • (b)General Circulation Model
  • (c)IPAT
  • (d)Leontief input-output model

  Answer(a) World3 — the system-dynamics model built by the MIT team, developing Jay Forrester's earlier world models.