#OLD PINGPLOTTER GAIA.UNIVERSITY UPDATE#
With innovation in business, along with new developments by governments and civil society, continuing to update the model provides another perspective on the challenges and opportunities we have to create a more sustainable world.”Īt the same time, she says, the primary concerns of the MIT study have been supplanted. “The key finding of my study is that we still have a choice to align with a scenario that does not end in collapse. She says there is nothing inevitable about its predictions – even now. The 1972 study’s authors, Herrington points out, were looking for paths toward a stabilized world in terms of economic growth. Herrington’s review concludes that the 1972 study was essentially on target. The MIT study, Herrington says, was never about making predictions but to show potential paths forward during a time of immense change. “He was right in the sense that my drive has always come naturally to me.” The key finding of my study is that we still have a choice to align with a scenario that does not end in collapse Gaya Herrington The policy officer who approached her at the UN meeting and spoke about the meaning and responsibility of her first name was not necessarily wrong, she adds. “I am driven by a passion for sustainability. “I would like ‘the kids to be OK’, even if none of them were mine,” she says. Her motivation, she says, is for the wellbeing of future generations. Herrington, who has a degree in econometrics from the University of Amsterdam and a master’s in sustainability from Harvard, believes that the field of economic sustainability has to be made into an observable science that can be acted upon. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.” The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing economic growth is incompatible with sustainability.Įarlier this year, in a paper titled Beyond Growth, the analyst wrote plainly: “Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade and collapse come about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios). Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website and credited to its publisher, the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology) independently “out of pure curiosity about data accuracy”.
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With MIT offering analysis and the other full of doom-laden predictions, both helped to fuel the era’s environmental movements, from Greenpeace to Earth First!. It was published just four years after Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb that forewarned of an imminent population collapse. Since its publication, The Limits to Growth has sold upwards of 30m copies. “That didn’t happen, so we’re seeing the impact of climate change.” “The MIT scientists said we needed to act now to achieve a smooth transition and avoid costs,” Herrington told the Guardian this week.
“From a research perspective, I felt a data check of a decades-old model against empirical observations would be an interesting exercise,” said Herrington, a sustainability analyst at the accounting giant KPMG that recently described greenhouse gas emissions as a “shared, existential challenge.” Now, with the climate crisis increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, and many single events shown to have been made worse by global heating, the Club of Rome, publisher of original MIT paper, has returned to the study. Research by Herrington, a rising star in efforts to place data analysis at the center of efforts to curb climate breakdown, affirmed the bleaker scenarios put forward in a landmark 1972 MIT study, The Limits to Growth, that presented various outcomes for what could happen when the growth of industrial civilization collided with finite resources. Coming amid a cascade of alarming environmental events, from western US and Siberian wildfires to German floods and a report that suggests the Amazon rainforest may no longer be able to perform as a carbon sink, Herrington’s work predicted the collapse could come around 2040 if current trends held.
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