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Sustainability Events

Limits to Growth: What a 50-Year-Old Model that Forecasted Global Collapse Tells Us About Avoiding It Today

Gaya Herrington

  • Director, Sustainability Services, KPMG US

Timiebi Aganaba

  • Assistant Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society

Gaya Herrington provides corporations and KPMG US partners in the Americas with long-term risk management and business strategy advice. Harrington is developing and implementing their Dynamic Assessment method, a new analytic and holistic technique based on interconnectivity of economic, social, and environmental elements.

Written by MIT scientists in 1972, Limits to Growth (LtG), predicted global societal collapse if humanity did not alter its priorities. Scenarios of the future were created in the first system-dynamics model, called World3. Given the prospect of collapse, Herrington was curious which scenarios aligned with current empirical data. Herrington collected data from academia, NGOs, UN entities, and the World Bank, which she plotted along World3 scenarios. She found close alignment with two scenarios.

In this talk, Herrington will discuss her research, published in Yale’s Journal of Industrial Ecology and featured in The Times, The Hill, and The Guardian. She will also discuss lessons from her findings, including opportunities to change humanity’s trajectory and the usability of continuous growth.

Timiebi Aganaba, who will moderate the discussion, is an SFIS faculty member and has an appointment at the Sandra Day O’Connor School of Law. She has experience in five countries on three continents in Space research, law, academia, executive leadership, and industry consulting that lends a unique perspective to how humanity might govern resources and the economy of Space.

Wednesday, November 17, 2021
1:00 - 2:00 p.m. AZ Time
3:00 - 4:00 p.m. EST