The Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan

The Club of Rome Climate Emergency Plan. Dec. 2018. A collaborative call for climate action.

“Climate change is now reaching an end-game scenario, where very soon humanity must choose between taking unprecedented action, or accepting that it has been left too late and bear the consequences”. 

Prof. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. 

Leading climate scientist. 

Director Emeritus Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. 

Club of Rome Member.

As a result of inaction, climate change now represents an existential risk to humanity. 

That is, a risk posing permanent, massively negative consequences which can never be undone. 

Decades of exponential growth in both population and consumption are now colliding with the limits of the Earth’s biosphere: the climate system is destabilizing; about half of the world’s tropical forests have already been cleared; in the last 150 years, half of its topsoil has been depleted; nearly 90% of fish stocks are either fully or overfished; and the sixth mass extinction event is well underway. 

This situation is exacerbated by a global leadership that has abrogated its moral responsibility to provide security for the world’s people and the planet, even as the risks of irreversible climate change escalate. 

The inability of our existing economic and financial systems to provide real quality of life and to ensure decent standards of living across the globe has also created social breaking points. The current neoclassical economic model was designed for an ‘empty’ world with a global population of around 2 billion people, when the bounty of natural resources seemed endless.