But Peccei was not content merely with the substantial achievements of Italconsult, or his responsibilities as president of Olivetti, and threw his energies into other organisations as well, including ADELA, an international consortium of bankers aimed at supporting industrialisation in Latin America.

He was asked to give the keynote speech in Spanish at the group's first meeting in 1965, which is when the series of coincidences leading to the creation of the Club of Rome began.

King wrote to Peccei, passing on Gvishiani's address and his wish to invite him to the Soviet Union, but also congratulating him on his paper and suggesting that they might meet sometime as they obviously shared similar concerns.

Peccei accordingly persuaded the Agnelli Foundation to fund a two-day brainstorming meeting on 7–8 April 1968 of around 30 European economists and scientists at the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome.

After the meeting there was an informal gathering of a few people in Peccei's home, which included Erich Jantsch (one of the great methodologists of planning studies), Alexander King, Hugo Thiemann, Lauro Gomes-Filho, Jean Saint-Geours, and Max Kohnstamm.

Although the Rome meeting had been convened with just Western Europe in mind, the group realised that they were dealing with problems of much larger scale and complexity—in short, "the predicament of mankind".

The notion of problematique excited some because it seemed applicable at a universal level, but worried others, who felt that the approach was valid only for smaller entities such as a city or community.

"[3] About the same time, a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), headed by Jay Forrester, began on the implications of continued growth on population increase, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation.

IIASA became a meeting place for scholars and scientists of different countries and provided a bridging function for the scientific world, producing important studies in different fields, including climate change, energy, and agriculture.

With the idea of placing greater stress on the human dimension, Peccei approached the Dutch economist and Nobel laureate Jan Tinbergen and proposed a study of the likely impact of a doubling of the population on the global community.

Tinbergen and his colleague Hans Linnemann came to the conclusion that the topic was unmanageably large and decided to focus on the problems of food for a doubling world population.

When this was put to the Club of Rome, Peccei and others disagreed strongly, feeling that other aspects such as strains on housing, urban infrastructure, and employment should not be ignored.

Ultimately Linnemann and his group pursued their research with funds they had already raised in the Netherlands and published their results independently, not as a report to the Club of Rome.

Peccei deliberately did not invite any of the major European powers, the US, or the Soviet Union so as to prevent the debate turning into a forum for national or ideological position statements.

As a logical extension of the Salzburg meeting, Peccei asked Jan Tinbergen to produce a follow-up report on global food and development policies, exploring these aspects much more thoroughly than the coverage in The Limits to Growth.

Peccei visited Las Gaviotas in the Vichada and endorsed the project of Paolo Lugari to regenerate the rainforest that was destroyed by decades of extensive cattle farming.