Pardee Center personnel have contributed forecasting expertise to four U.S. National Intelligence Council’s quadrennial Global Trends reports. These are forward-looking documents prepared for delivery to the incoming or re-elected President and designed to aid policy makers by highlighting alternative futures for key geopolitical issues.

The Pardee Center in successful with UNDP Yemen has produced two reports on the impact of conflict on development in Yemen.  The first report compared Yemen in conflict to a world in which conflict had not occurred. The second report explores different policy interventions during conflict and concluded that the only way to move Yemen back on a positive development trajectory was to end the war.  Both reports received significant media attention. This third report focuses on post-conflict development in Yemen through examining seven potential recovery scenarios, identifying key leverage points and making recommendations for a strong and sustainable recovery. The report finds that the conflict’s damage will be felt even in recovery but if Yemen can reach a lasting peace deal and pursue and integrated recovery strategy, it can be put on a path to not only catch up with but to surpass its pre-war SDG trajectory by 2050.

The IFs team continues to collaborate with the Atlantic Council on issues including assessing global risks, urbanization and its impacts, the security implications of natural resources including food, water, and energy, state fragility and resilience, the end of global tyranny in our lifetimes, and the assessment and forecasting of power globally. Specifically, we work with the Foresight, Strategy and Risks (FSR) Initiative, a program that provides "actionable foresight and innovative strategies to a global community of policymakers, business leaders, and citizens.

Trade between China and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) experienced dramatic growth since the early 2000s. By 2035, trade values will likely reach unprecedented levels. Providing greater insight into future commercial scenarios, this report outlines four scenarios for China-LAC trade through 2035. It aims to trigger policy discussions and influence actions based on how this growing relationship may evolve. The report shows that China and the United States will probably account for similar shares of the region’s overall trade, but with important distinctions across LAC countries.

Ukraine’s recent past has been marked by an array of contrary events and trends, including civil re-awakening and persistent corruption, democratic reform and constitutional crises, societal reconciliation and violent conflict. In light of these counter-balancing phenomena, it is difficult to assess whether optimism, pessimism, or some degree of middling realism is warranted when attempting to determine where Ukraine is plausibly headed next.

In 2020, the Frederick S. Pardee Center for International Futures partnered with EnCompass LLC to support the USAID Ukraine Monitoring and Learning Support activity. This effort uses the Pardee Center’s International Futures tool to quantitatively model scenarios meant to assess Ukraine’s progress toward USAID/Ukraine’s 2019-2024 Country Development Cooperation Strategy Development Objectives. Each year, Pardee researchers will update their scenario analysis, seeking to reflect the impact of recent developments. Additionally, the Pardee team will provide interim analyses and guidance on how to incorporate systems thinking into USAID/Ukraine’s long-term planning.

The Pardee Center team has provided support to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in a number of ways. Most recently, we expanded our ability to measure and visualize each country’s progress over time in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. This report is a part of this collaboration, aimed at assessing the impact of conflict in North-East Nigeria.

The unfolding conflict in North-East Nigeria is preventing concerted progress toward short-, medium-, and long-range development goals that the SDGs represent. This joint Pardee Center-UNDP report provides a comprehensive assessment of the conflict’s impact on development across issue areas and scenarios using the IFs model. It compares two scenarios for evaluating conflict’s direct and indirect effects in North-East Nigeria: A Conflict scenario that simulates conflict and its effects based on the best data and literature available, and a No Conflict scenario that simulates development in a counterfactual without conflict.

Our partnership with the U.S. Army Future Studies Group (previously the Chief of Staff of the Army's Strategic Studies Group) explored the future operational environment for the US Army using new structured datasets and our existing modeling tools, including the IFs model. Our database creation efforts focused on measuring military hardware to construct indices of hard capabilities, military capital stocks, and bilateral “reach.”

Following a presentation of our development trends report for USAID in Southern Africa, Irish Aid asked our team, along with our partners at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS), to expand our trend and scenario analysis in Mozambique. Together, we launched “Prospects and Challenges: Mozambique’s Growth and Human Development Outlook to 2040” in Maputo. The report included an adjusted IFs Base Case, or Current Path, scenario to better understand how advances in the country’s natural gas production might affect Mozambique’s development prospects.

In 2015, our team, along with Dr. Randall Kuhn, led a training on IFs for the Thai Ministry of Public Health as part of a World Health Organization sponsored program. The training focused on understanding health trends in Thailand, forecasting mortality and morbidity across different disease types, and exploring potential policy interventions that could impact health outcomes.

In 2014, the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) awarded a three-year grant to our Institute and a team of Korbel faculty as part of its Minerva Research Initiative. Researchers on this multi-faceted project analyzed previous attempts to predict the onset of state failure, evaluate the drivers of state fragility, build tools and data associated with the drivers of domestic conflict, and use IFs to forecast the probability of future state failure. In parallel with the development of a series of quantitative models that might be used to forecast state failure, our researchers produced 50 qualitative case studies that summarized key circumstances leading to past state failure events around the world. This grant also covered research on modeling dyadic conflict. In addition, this grant supported the continued development of the Major Episodes of Contention (MEC) database led by Korbel Professor Erica Chenoweth.