Who has propounded the concept of ‘Limit to Growth’?

The correct answer is A) Club of Rome. The Club of Rome, an informal think tank founded in 1968 by Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King, commissioned the 1972 report The Limits to Growth. Its authors at MIT, led by Donella Meadows, used a computer model called World3 to show that unchecked exponential growth in population, resource use and pollution could lead to overshoot and collapse.

• UNESCO works on education, science and culture. It did not propound this concept.
• Brundtland Commission (WCED, 1987) produced Our Common Future and gave the widely used definition of sustainable development. That is a different idea from limits to growth.
• Agenda 21 is an action plan adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. It is a policy programme, not the source of the growth-limits thesis.

The core concept is the finite carrying capacity of the planet, which later fed into planetary boundaries and the sustainable development debate. For Mains, link it to the Stockholm Conference of 1972 and to the environment-versus-development argument in GS-3.

Trap: aspirants pick Brundtland or Agenda 21 because they are better known. Remember that Brundtland defined sustainable development, and the growth-limits report came from the Club of Rome.