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Club of Rome Global Assembly 2009
Amsterdam, 26-27 October 2009
Muziekgebouw aan ‘t IJ/ Harbour Music Hall
AMSTERDAM DECLARATION: download
Welcome message by Wouter van Dieren, Member of the Club of Rome,
and Job Cohen, Mayor of Amsterdam:
It is time to hit the “tipping point” for “runaway change”, away from the structures that have long functioned and brought prosperity to many,
but at hidden costs that can no longer be absorbed, and time to construct a track to inclusiveness and one-planet economic growth.
How do we get rid off the inefficiencies and spilling in our technology and economic system? What
governance structures can secure common goods, like access to energy, biodiversity and ecosystems services.
And what new accounting systems can better measure prosperity than GDP does? What financial systems can
promote equitable and carbon free growth. These were just a few of the themes that were discussed and led to a declaration proposing
key ingredients for a global new green deal.
Wouter van Dieren, host of the conference: “The Club of Rome, together with the World Political Forum and Globe international,
at its 2009 Global Assembly addressed climate change, energy and economic recovery in close connection.
The Assembly was the last of seven stepping stones, seven global meetings, starting in Turin early 2008,
in the run-up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Copenhagen in December 2009,
on which depends so much.”
The global issues that the 1972 report “Limits to Growth” sketched so imminently are even more severe and urgent today.
“Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point at which human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major climate
changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum. (...) The implications are profound, and the only resolution
is for humans to move to a fundamentally different energy pathway within a decade. Otherwise, it will be too late
for one-third of the world’s animal and plant species and millions of the most vulnerable members of our own species. (...)
Understanding the nature and causes of climate change is essential to crafting solutions to our current crisis,” wrote Nasa’s
James Hansen [1]. And climate change is only one of the intensifying environmental challenges.
The world is headed into a perfect storm of interconnected environmental and other crises. Almost 40
years after “Limits to Growth”, once again, the Club of Rome feels the need to intervene on the global
stage and launched a three year, integrated programme of international research and consultation:
“A New Path for World Development”. The 2009 annual Club of Rome Global Assembly unites many of
the bricks of the New Path that are emerging all around the globe and invites everyone to come and help lay out the first stretch.
We are betting the very future of our planet and species, a stake no poker player would ever consider.
We are writing cheques, we can no longer cash. A new path of economic and social progress must be adopted
which is compatible with the environmental imperatives and limits of the planet.
The financial crisis and the consequent economic slowdown provide an exceptional opportunity to move towards new patterns of more
sustainable and equitable growth. “This economic crisis must mark the beginning of a new sustainable development path
that has been long overdue,” says keynote speaker Mikhail Gorbachev [2]. Only through new ideas, new partnerships,
new mechanisms and radical institutional change the answers to the unprecedented challenges ahead can be found.
Remember Einstein’s words: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
[1]Hansen, J., 2008: Tipping point: Perspective of a climatologist. In State of the Wild 2008-2009: A Global
Portrait of Wildlife, Wildlands, and Oceans. W. Woods, Ed. Wildlife Conservation Society/Island Press, pp. 6-15.
[2]GCI press release, 30 March 2009
