A 1970s publication caused a big stir when it showed that continuing on business-as-usual population and consumption growth trajectories would likely lead to societal collapse within a century. Were the scientists behind it right?

A major scientific warning
If you’re a Population Connection supporter, you’re most likely familiar with The Limits to Growth (LtG), a seminal scientific report published in 1972 by think-tank The Club of Rome. Using computer models developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the authors demonstrated the danger of ignoring the finiteness of our planet. They warned,

“If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next one hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”

The Limits to Growth standard model, Meadows et al 1972
In the LtG researchers’ “standard” model, which reflects business-as-usual, population, food production, and industrial output (a measure of economic growth) increase exponentially until rapidly diminishing natural resources cause an economic slowdown beginning around 1970. Population and pollution continue to increase for some time after peak industrialization, but decreased food and medical services cause death rates to rise from around 2020 onward, leading to a rapid fall in population beginning around 2030.

According to the LtG standard model, we are now roughly at the beginning of the end. The authors pointed out that given the many uncertainties in their model, it is not possible to accurately predict the date that things start going badly wrong, but that it is highly likely that growth will stop well before the year 2100. Is societal collapse this decade really that likely, and if so, can we still avert it? Let’s take a look at what experts think nowadays.

[As an aside, “collapse” does not necessarily mean human extinction. In his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, acclaimed scientist and author Jared Diamond defined it as “a drastic decrease in human population size and/or political/economic/social complexity, over a considerable area, for an extended time.”]

Accuracy of The Limits to Growth models
An independent 2014 analysis of the Limits to Growth models concluded that we had thus far been following the “standard,” business-as-usual scenario very closely, with world population and the global economy continuing to grow at roughly the same rates as in the decades before 1970.

The LtG researchers also ran several more optimistic models — some featured in their 1972 book, and some in later publications. A more recent, independent 2020 analysis of the accuracy of the LtG models found that the two scenarios that represented the closest fit to historical data were one in which natural resources are twice as abundant as in the standard model, and one that assumes rapid technological innovation.

The LtG authors included the doubled resources scenario in case their estimate of the global stock of resources was wrong. The scenario assumes technological discoveries and advances would double the amount of resources that can be extracted and used. In this scenario, collapse occurs, but is caused by pollution (interpreted in the 2020 analysis as including greenhouse gases leading to climate change), rather than resource depletion.

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