Initiated in 1968, The Club of Rome (specifically Hasan Özbekhan, Erich Jantsch and Alexander Christakis) soon after produced its statement of purpose  "The Predicament of Mankind," which begins as follows:

As in every epoch of its existence, mankind today findsi tself in a particular "situation". And as always this situation is created and nurtured by those who live amid the myriad events that comprise it—events that now are in the process of tumultuous and ever accelerating change, events that now increasingly and even violently clash with one another. In some deep sense our situation compels us to animate and perpetuate it almost blindly, and thus to move toward a future whose shape or quality we do not comprehend, whose surprises we have not succeeded in reducing to a rational frame of ideas, whose complexities we are not in the least sure of being able to control.

On pages 14 to 16, under the title "Continuous Critical Problems—an illustrative list," 49 problems are named, beginning with "Explosive population growth with consequent escalation of social, economic, and other problems" and "Widespread poverty throughout the world," and ending with "Irrational practices in resource investment" and "Insufficient understanding of Continuous Critical Problems, of their nature, their interactions and of the future consequences both they and current solutions to them are generating."

A cursory look at this list will suggest that although more than 40 years have passed since it was written, all the problems that were mentioned are still both "continuous" and "critical." 

In addition,  the problem that is presently in the focus of the public eye—the climate change—was not even mentioned on the list:

Neither was the problem that revealed itself more recently, but whose threat may now be most immediate—the possible, or as some experts will say probable or even certain non-sustainability of our financial system: