Professor Dennis Meadows led a research team that in the 1972 study "The Limits to Growth," using a computer model called World3, forecast that on current trends humanity was headed for doom by 2100.

Meadows, of the US Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was the lead author of the study, which became a best-seller but was also attacked as alarmist and opposed to technology and progress.

Emperor Akihito watched Thursday as Meadows, 65, received the 500,000-dollar annual Japan Prize from the country's Science and Technology Foundation for "transformation towards a sustainable society in harmony with nature."

In his study, Meadows argued that "human demand exceeds nature's supply."

Unless the human race switched from exponential population and economic growth to a sustainable system, his team argued, they would "overshoot" the Earth's limits, leading to the collapse of human civilisation.

More than three decades on -- a time span in which the world population has grown from less than four billion to more than six billion -- Meadows said that today he sees even fewer signs of hope.

"In 1972, our projections suggested growth would end in this 21st century, and that still seems inevitable to me," he told a Tokyo conference this week.

"If demand against the planet rises above its carrying capacity, the carrying capacity will decline," he said.

"Growth will not end gradually and peacefully in the distant future. It will end soon and suddenly through overshoot and collapse."

Meadows' 1972 model looked at five trends -- industrialisation, population growth, malnutrition, resource depletion and environmental degradation -- and did not factor in additional shocks such as wars or pandemics.

Speaking in Japan, a country heavily impacted by the global economic crisis, Meadows said that "until recently, it seemed impossible that individual human action could damage the global economy."

"Now the unfolding collapse of the global credit markets and the precipitous decline in production threaten all nations," he said.

Yet Meadows argued that the key lessons have not been learned, and that the search for solutions to the crisis remain based on "trust in the markets and the current faith in technological advances."

"Indeed, the most common policy for solving current economic problems is a desperate effort to get the growth of the physical economy back onto its historical, exponential track," he said. "I know this policy will not work."

Another US researcher, David E. Kuhl, 79, a professor of radiology at the University of Michigan, also received a Japan Prize.

Kuhl was honoured for his ground-breaking research on medical imaging and is credited with laying the foundation for the field of molecular imaging.

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