International Encyclopedia of Systems and Cybernetics

An international group of scholars and businessmen created in 1967 by the Italian businessman Aurelio PECCEI and whose aim is the study of human problems on a global scale.

The Club or Rome started by ordering to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.l.T.) a study of the trends that may endanger our planetary society in the making.

This report, methodologically based on J. FORRESTER's Systems dynamics, was published in 1972. It stressed the interactions between five global critical factors: demographic explosion, food production; industrialization; exhaustion of natural resources and global contamination.

The quite pessimistic conclusions of the report triggered a flood of criticism, based partly on doubts about the soundness of the methodology and partly on ideological bents and biases. More reports were then ordered by the Club of Rome, using the same method for different purposes. The true aim of PECCEI and his friends was however not to make precise and irrefutable forecasts, but to draw worldly the attention on possible evolutive contradictions within our mega-system aforming.

It is now recognized that we are all "Groping in the dark" (D. MEADOWS et al., 1982), after two decades of global modeling, because the tangle of interacting systems is so complex that it is hopeless to ever reach secure conclusions. Moreover, during the seventies, when the models were constructed, neither the implications of deterministic chaos were taken in account, nor the stochastic aspects of dissipative structuration in our obviously far from equilibrium systems. But at least we know it now and become more and more aware of the need to monitor long term global trends.