Hoping for the Future. A Russian Report to the Club of Rome

Abstract

We are excited to announce the upcoming release of our new book called Reconsidering the Limits to Growth. A Report to the Russian Association of the Club of Rome. This report is the result of more than ten years of work on modeling and forecasting world dynamics and it reflects the views of Russian scientists on the future of global development. In some respect our report can be regarded as preliminary research attempting to understand how we can expand the limits in the future. In doing so, these limits should be viewed in a broad historical context (and not just as a continuation of 20th century trends). The title of our report, ‘Reconsidering the Limits’, certainly echoes the famous ‘The Limits to Growth’ (by Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens III). This is no coincidence, as 2022 marked the fiftieth anniversary of this report, which is one of the landmark scientific works that gave impetus to understanding the changed trends and played a prominent role in understanding the path of humanity towards the future. However, in our report, the concept of limits is understood more broadly and covers not only the process of overcoming the limits that hinder development, but also implies situations when such limits become irrelevant. So in our response to the Club of Rome we choose to look at the interactions among aging, capitalism, inequality, climate change, resources, technology, and world order. This list does not exhaust all of the future topics that might be examined but it certainly represents an ambitious undertaking of a group of Russian analysts working in Moscow.