The Club of Rome is a nonprofit, informal organization of intellectuals and business leaders whose goal is a critical discussion of pressing global issues. The Club of Rome was founded in 1968 at Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, Italy. At least until the early 2000s, the 'main club' has allegedly been limited to one hundred members, often selected from current and former heads of state and government, UN administrators, high-level politicians, diplomats, scientists, economists, and business leaders from around the globe. It stimulated considerable public attention in 1972 with the first report to the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth. Since 1 July 2008, the organization has been based in Winterthur, Switzerland.

In 1965, the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei gave a speech about the dramatic scientific and technological changes happening in the world. The speech was noticed by Alexander King, a British scientist who had advised the British government, and who was currently serving as Director-General for Scientific Affairs at the OECD. King arranged a meeting with Peccei. The pair shared a lack of confidence that the problems faced by the world could be solved by development and technological progress.^{[citation needed]}

In April 1968, Peccei and King convened a small international group of people from the fields of academia, civil society, diplomacy, and industry met at Villa Farnesina in Rome. The background paper to set the tone of the meeting was entitled "A tentative framework for initiating system wide planning of world scope", by Austrian OECD consultant Erich Jantsch. However, the meeting was described as a "monumental flop", with discussions becoming bogged down in technical and semantic debates.

After the meeting, Peccei, King, Jantsch, and Hugo Thiemann decided to form the Club of Rome, named for the city of their meeting.

Central to the formation of the club was Peccei's concept of the problematic. It was his opinion that viewing the problems of humankind—environmental deterioration, poverty, endemic ill-health, urban blight, criminality—individually, in isolation or as "problems capable of being solved in their own terms", was doomed to failure. All are interrelated. "It is this generalized meta-problem (or meta-system of problems) which we have called and shall continue to call the 'problematic' that inheres in our situation."

In October 1968, the OECD held a symposium in Bellagio, Italy, in collaboration with the Rockefeller Foundation, at which several new members joined the club. The symposium focused on the dangers of exponential growth—which by its nature cannot continue forever—and ended with participants signing "The Bellagio Declaration on Planning", which emphasized the need to overcome global problems through coordination.

For a brief period, the club's ideas held sway within the OECD, thanks to King's efforts in promoting the group's work. When Secretary General Thorkil Kristensen formed a group of ten science and economic experts in 1969 to study problems for modern societies, four of the ten were members of the Club of Rome.

In 1970, Peccei's vision was laid out in a document written by Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch, and Alexander Christakis. Entitled, The Predicament of Mankind; Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties: A PROPOSAL. The document would serve as the roadmap for the Limits to Growth project.^{[citation needed]}