The Club of Rome (CoR) is a private informal group of scholars and businessmen founded by the Italian industrialist Dr. Aurelio Peccei and the scientist Alexander King in 1968 in the city of Rome. The members of CoR at the time of its inception shared concerns about the future of mankind and the ecological well-being of the planet amid growing population, rapid depletion of world resources, and environmental crisis. In 1972, CoR gained the global limelight with the publication of its first commissioned report, called Limits to Growth, led by Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar Dennis Meadows.

Unique circumstances led to the rise of CoR in the 1960s. Some of these were the decline of superpowers; social movements of the 1960s; the end of postwar economic ...