Azcona, G. & Bhatt, A. (2022). Poverty deepens for women and girls, according to latest projections. UN Women.

New projections of global poverty by UN Women, UNDP and the Pardee Center for International Futures estimate that, globally, 388 million women and girls will be living in extreme poverty in 2022 (compared to 372 million men and boys). But the outlook could be far worse. In a “high-damage” scenario, this number could balloon to 446 million (427 million for men and boys).

Verhagen, W. et al., 2021. The Future of Food Security in the Wake of a Global Pandemic. Report. Research Technical Assistance Center: Washington, DC.

Annual Update for the Pardee Center for International Futures, 2020-2021

The International Futures (IFs) forecasting system is central to much of the Pardee Center’s work, constantly helping us to understand, explore, and communicate the complex reality in which we live and the alternative futures that might be brought into being. Over the past year, main thrusts of model development included: (1) strengthening the model’s representation of global crises (in this case, the COVID-19 pandemic); (2) enhancing analysis of progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); (3) improving our ability to analyze the pursuit of food security; (4) supporting data initialization; and (5) continuing to improve its User Interface.

Moyer, Jonathan D., Collin J. Meisel, Austin S. Matthews, David K. Bohl, and Mathew J. Burrows. 2021.

"China-US Competition: Measuring Global Influence." Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures. Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs. Report for Atlantic Council Scowcroft Center.

Beyond measuring US and Chinese influence capacity, the FBIC Index can be used to analyze changing influence capacity dynamics for more than 200 countries and between more than 20,000 country pairs from 1960 through 2020. Data include a summary measure of influence capacity as well as its primary components—bandwidth and dependence—and their political, economic, and security subcomponents.

Hughes, Barry B., Taylor Hanna, Kaylin McNeil, David K. Bohl, and Jonathan D. Moyer. 2021.

"Pursuing the Sustainable Development Goals in a World Reshaped by COVID-19." Denver, CO and New York, NY: Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures and United Nations Development Programme.

Hughes BB, Narayan K (2021) Enhancing integrated analysis of national and global goal pursuit by endogenizing economic productivity. PLoS ONE 16(2): e0246797. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0246797

Annual Update for the Pardee Center for International Futures

A decade has passed since the release of the first two volumes in the Center’s Patterns of Potential Human Progress (PPHP) series. Those volumes, published jointly by Paradigm and Oxford University Press India, were Reducing Global Poverty (2009) and Advancing Global Education (2010). The volumes broke new ground in research in the two issue areas by looking out across 50 years in over 180 countries and by incorporating treatment of their respective subject matter within an extensively integrated model system.

Prior to the work undertaken for the volumes, the International Futures (IFs) system did not contain separate representation of either poverty or education, but it did include strong models of demographics and economics as a foundation for them. Generous support from Frederick S. Pardee made it possible to develop extensive models not only for poverty and education, but also for health, infrastructure, and governance (the subjects of the three later volumes in the PPHP series) within the IFs system. Reducing poverty and advancing education remain central to global goals for improving the wellbeing of individuals and societies. Where are we now, 10 years after the publication of these first two volumes in the PPHP series?

— BARRY HUGHES & MOHAMMOD IRFAN

Sellers, S. (2020). Cause of death variation under the shared socioeconomic pathways. Climatic Change. doi:10.1007/s10584-020-02824-0

Climate change will create numerous risks for human health, including impacts associated with temperature extremes, diarrheal diseases, and undernutrition. Such risks, along with other socioeconomic and development trends, will affect cause-of-death patterns experienced in the coming decades. This study explores future mortality trends using the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSP) framework, a widely utilized tool for understanding socioeconomic development trends in a world with climate change. Existing projections for GDP, urbanization, and demographic trends based on SSP narratives are incorporated into an integrated assessment model, International Futures (IFs), in order to project mortality levels by cause of death for all countries from 2020 to 2100. Under more optimistic SSPs, non-communicable diseases (NCDs) rise as a proportion of all deaths, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, while more pessimistic SSPs suggest a continued high burden of largely preventable communicable diseases. In highincome countries, significant continued burdens of NCDs are projected for the remainder of the century under all SSPs. Comparisons are also made to recent cause-of-death projections from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) to assess how the IFs and IHME models vary.

Sanderson, Benjamin M., and Brian C. O'Neill. 2020. “Assessing the costs of historical inaction on climate change.” Scientific Reports 10, 9173 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66275-4