Blog post from 2022: What a 50-year-old world model tells us about a way forward today
by Gaya Herrington, 17 May 2022
"My research went viral last summer. I found out via a friend’s text, jokingly accusing me of 'announcing the end of the world.' For several days, headlines on major US news pages declared that my research proved we are on the brink of collapse. A few days later, UK pages touted the same headlines. Then I saw my name popping up in languages I do not know, from Swedish, to Greek, to Chinese, to Sinhala.
"It took me a bit by surprise. My research had been published months earlier, in November 2020. Also, it was a data comparison of a model from a book that was almost half a century old. Apart from the headlines being a simplistic version of my research’ message, they also gave the impression that the possibility of societal collapse suddenly had been revealed. But this warning was a key message of The #LimitsToGrowth (#LtG) book, which the authors Meadows, Meadows, Randers & Behrens, published back in 1972. In LtG, commissioned by the #ClubOfRome, the authors identified society’s relentless pursuit of growth not as the solution to, but the cause of, so many of the #environmental and social crises that plague humanity still today. Their analysis was based on a global model called World3. The authors created different scenarios by varying World3’s underlying assumptions. This scenario analysis helped them study global dynamics between variables including industrial output, resources, pollution, and living standards. In my research, I compared four LtG scenarios against a few decades of empirical data. Details about the scenarios methods and results, can be found in my article in Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology. An easier read with the gist of my findings was also published on the Club of Rome website. Here, I’ll just share my conclusions, illustrated by a graph of the variable people might be most concerned with: living standards (Figure 1). This graph is from my upcoming book Five Insights for Avoiding Global Collapse, soon available online under Creative Commons, which contains further research analysis and 2022 data update of my comparison."
The author goes on to explain the graph. I'm focusing on Herrington's scenarios, especially the "SW" scenario in my next post...
https://www.clubofrome.org/blog-post/herrington-ltg50/
#Degrowth #Extinction #ClimateCrisis #EnvironmentalCollapse #Ecocide #Warning
