Section: New Results

Sensitivity analysis of World3

World3 is a computer tool created to simulate the interactions between the world population, industrial growth and food production within the limits of the planet. It aims to highlight the problems posed by indefinite material growth in a finite world. The first version of this tool was proposed in 1972 by MIT researchers for the first report to the Club of Rome [19]. This report was both highly successful and polemic. The main detractors of the model criticized it for being too approximate in the choice of the parameters and for beeing too simplistic. We started to work on revisiting some aspects of the scientific validation of this model, in a context where growth is widely debated in the scientific and civil community, through a new and more sophisticated sensitivity analysis of the model, compared to what is available in the literature [11].