Growing within limits. A report to the Global Assembly 2009 of the Club of Rome

Current trends in fossil-fuel use and inefficient land use will lead to large global environmental problems with respect to climate change and biodiversity loss. Technical and economically feasible options are available to meet the challenge to avoid these problems. The main issue is that of creating institutional and policy conditions for a more sustainable economy. This report looks into the possible developments in the climate and energy system on the one hand, and biodiversity and land use on the other hand. Obviously, also other important global environmental problems exist, but these are outside the scope of this report. The report presents two scenarios: a baseline, business-as-usual scenario (Trend scenario) explores the risks of climate change and biodiversity loss, while the Challenge scenario explores the pathway and required actions to bring about a more environmentally sustainable future (Chapter 2). This chapter also briefly assesses whether the threat of overshoot and collapse, as identified in The Limits to Growth, is still valid and which 'safe' constraints could be defined that characterise a sustainable development.Chapter 3 focuses further on the issue of climate change, exploring the requirements for a low-carbon society, by 2050, compared with the Trend scenario. What would the energy mix in such a future look like? What crucial technological choices are there to be made? Which combinations of technological and non-technological solutions are possible? Chapter 4 focuses on the issues of land use and biodiversity loss. Could agricultural productivity be increased to such an extent that it is possible to use less land for food production and more land for bio-energy? What can be the contribution of dietary changes? This report takes an explicitly global perspective, but occasionally lower levels are included to do justice to the multi-level complexity of the issues at stake. The concluding Chapter 5 looks at a range of strategies and measures on global, regional and national levels, including their institutional prerequisites. Moreover, behaviour and consumption is addressed to be included in taking up the environmental challenges. It should be noted that, in presenting these strategies and measures, this report does not provide a recipe for sustainable development, but rather offers a range of scientifically rooted options that address the environmental challenges. These options indicate the challenges and offer ways of deflecting from environmentally damaging business-as-usual pathways towards more environmentally sustainable development. While using the 1972 limits to growth publication as starting point, the findings of this report ar not always equal to those of Meadows et al. (1972)