Hughes, B. B. (2026). International Futures: Exploring and Shaping. London Academic Press, An Imprint Of Elsevier.

eBook ISBN: 978-3-032-22084-4

ISBN: 978-3-032-22083-7

Pardee Institute founding Director, Barry Hughes, has published the fifth edition of Exploring and Shaping International Futures, an open-access book that makes the foundations of International Futures available as a practical guide for learning, teaching, scenario analysis, and long-term policy thinking.

The book updates earlier editions for the eighth generation of IFs and is organized around three questions: What future would we like? Where do current trends appear to be taking us? And what leverage do people and institutions have to shape what comes next? Across chapters on population, economics, human well-being, food and agriculture, energy, the environment, and domestic and global sociopolitical systems, Hughes connects forecasts, model insights, and points of intervention to help readers examine uncertainty, choices, and possible futures.

Hughes, B. B., Solórzano, J., & Rothman, D. S., Irfan, R. I., Sahadevan, D. (2025, November 11). IFs energy model documentation. Pardee Center for International Futures, Josef Korbel School of Global and Public Affairs, University of Denver. https://pardeewiki.du.edu/index.php?title=Energy

Hughes, B. B. (2025, July 22). Analysis of integrated global SDG pursuit: Challenges and progress. Sustainability, 17(15), 6672. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17156672

How can we more fully analyze potential progress toward the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, globally and by country? Methodological challenges include (1) the comprehensiveness of issue coverage, integration of causal elaboration, and geographic detail in available models; (2) clear quantification of goal targets; and (3) specification of scenario interventions that connect meaningfully to the potential leverage of agents. This study uses a large-scale, global but country-based analytical system that tightly integrates multiple issue-area models to push against methodological challenges. It explores the prospects for progress toward selected quantified targets across all goals, using scenarios that consider potential agency-linked interventions relative to the Current Path (CP). The scenarios distinguish interventions focused on Human Development (HD) and natural system sustainability (NSS) plus a Combined SDG scenario (CSDG). Even with a large, integrated push through 2030 and 2050, the world in aggregate will fail to reach many targets, and a great many of the 188 countries represented will fall short. Also of interest is possible tension between the underlying thrusts of HD- and NSS-oriented interventions. Both the Current Path of key variables and intervention leverage constraints make NSS goals harder to reach than HD goals. Because synergies of action considerably outweigh trade-offs, however, complementarity better characterizes the two intervention sets.

Solórzano, J., Hughes, B., Irfan, M., Xiong, Y., Kwasi, S., Ibrahim, A., Makhamatova, S., Hanna, T., Moyer, J. (2024, December 20). Protocol for making forecasts exogenous in the International Futures model. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xpro.2024.103414

Understanding future dynamics and trends in human and natural development is foundational for creating appropriate policy strategies to address planetary and development challenges. Here, we present a protocol for adding exogenous series for key variables, such as the shared socioeconomic pathways, to the database of the International Futures (IFs) integrated model. We describe steps for installing IFs and the SQLiteStudio software, understanding the IFs database, importing series, running the model, and extracting results.
For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Moyer.

International Futures: Building and Using Global Models extensively covers one of the most advanced systems for integrated, long-term, global and large-scale forecasting analysis available today, the International Futures (IFs) system.

Turner, S., Neill, C., Hughes, B.B., Narayan, K. (2024, June 6). Guide to scenario analysis in International Futures (IFs). Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures.

The purpose of this document is to facilitate the development of scenarios with the International Futures (IFs) system. This document supplements the IFs Training Manual. That manual provides a general introduction to IFs and assistance with the use of the interface (e.g., how do I create a graphic?). In turn, the broader Help system of IFs supplements this manual. It provides detailed information on the structure of IFs, including the underlying equations in the model (e.g., what does the economic production function look like?).

This document should help users understand the leverage points that are available to change parameters (and in a few cases even equations) and create alternative scenarios relative to the Base Case scenario of IFs (e.g., how do I decrease fertility rates or increase agricultural production?). It proceeds across the modules of IFs, such as demographic, economic, energy, health, and infrastructure, to (1) identify some of the key variables that you might want to influence to build scenarios and (2) the parameters that you will want to manipulate to affect your variables of interest. The Training Manual will help you actually make the parameter changes in the computer program and the Help system will facilitate your understanding of the structures, equations and algorithms that constitute the model. We begin by introducing the types of parameters within IFs and then proceed to a discussion of variables and parameters within each of the IFs modules.

Hanna, T., Hughes, B.B., Irfan, M.T., Bohl, D.K., Solórzano et al. (2024, April 16). Sustainable Development Goal Attainment in the Wake of COVID-19: Simulating an Ambitious Policy Push. Sustainability. 3309. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16083309

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was not on course to meet key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger). Some significant degree of additional effort was needed before the pandemic, and the challenge is now greater. Analyzing the prospects for meeting these goals requires attention to the combined effects of the pandemic and such additional impetus. This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on progress toward the SDGs and explores strategies to recover and accelerate development. Utilizing the International Futures (IFs) forecasting system and recognizing the near impossibility of meeting the goals by 2030, three scenarios are examined through to 2050: A pre-COVID-19 trajectory (No COVID-19), the current path influenced by the pandemic (Current Path), and a transformative SDG-focused approach prioritizing key policy strategies to accelerate outcomes (SDG Push). The pandemic led to a rise in extreme poverty and hunger, with recovery projected to be slow. The SDG Push scenario effectively addresses this, surpassing the Current Pathand achieving significant global improvements in poverty, malnutrition, and human development by 2050 even relative to the No COVID-19 path. The findings emphasize the need for integrated, transformative actions to propel sustainable development.

Moyer, J. D., Pirzadeh, A., Irfan, M., Solórzano, J. R., Stone, B. A., Xiong, Y., Hanna, T., & Hughes, B. B. (2023, October 2). How many people will live in poverty because of climate change? A macro-level projection analysis to 2070. Climatic Change 176(13). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-023-03611-3.

Fossil fuel-based economic development both causes climate change and contributes to poverty alleviation, creating tensions across societal efforts to maintain growth, limit climate damage, and improve human development. While many studies explore key aspects of this dilemma, few direct attention to the pathways from climate change through socioeconomic development to the future of poverty. We build on projections of global temperature change (representative concentration pathways) and country-specific economic development (economic growth and income distribution across the shared socioeconomic pathways) to model how climate change may affect future poverty with the International Futures (IFs) model, projecting poverty across income thresholds for 175 countries through 2070. Central tendency scenarios with climate effects compared with scenarios that do not model climate change show that climate change-attributable extreme poverty will grow to 25 million people by 2030 (range: 18 to 30), 40 million by 2050 (range: 9 to 78), and 32 million by 2070 (range: 4 to 130) though overall levels of global poverty decline. If climatic tipping points are passed, the climate-attributable extreme poverty grows to 57 million people by 2030 (range: 40–72), 78 million by 2050 (range: 18–193), and 56 million by 2070 (range: 7–306). To mitigate baseline effects of climate change on extreme poverty, an improvement of global income inequality of 10% is required (range: 5–15%).

Abidoye, B., Felix, J., Kapto, S. & Patterson, L. (2021). Leaving No One Behind: Impact of COVID-19 on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). New York, NY and Denver CO: United Nations Development Programme and Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures.

The Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to provide the futures modeling that underpins Leaving No One Behind: Impact of COVID-19 on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Using the International Futures (IFs) model, Pardee researchers analyzed multiple COVID-19 recovery scenarios to help policymakers understand the pandemic's long-term implications for sustainable development. The analysis showed that while COVID-19 threatened to widen global inequalities, strategic investments in governance, social protection, green development, and digitalization could help many countries recover and even exceed pre-pandemic development trajectories—demonstrating how long-range, evidence-based modeling can inform more resilient policy decisions.