Researching Global Futures to Improve Human Development
Our Mission
The Pardee Center builds and uses data and tools to analyze our complex world and the long-term dynamics of change in human, social, and natural systems. We share our resources with policymakers, academics, and others seeking to improve the ways we contemplate and plan for the global future. Our flagship tool is the International Futures (IFs) model, which combines interconnected models across multiple domains: agriculture, demographics, economics, education, energy, environment, gender, governance, health, infrastructure, international politics, and technology.
What is IFs?
International Futures (IFs) is a tool for thinking about long-term country-specific, regional, and global futures. IFs integrates forecasts across different sub-models that are dynamically connected for 186 countries, allowing IFs to simulate how changes in one system lead to changes across all other systems. As a result, IFs endogenizes more relationships from a wider range of key global systems than any other model in the world. You can use IFs to explore how countries and regions have developed in the past, how they might grow and change in the future, and possible futures based on policy choices.
IFs leverages historical data across over 5,000 historical series, identifies and measures trends, and models dynamic relationships to forecast hundreds of variables for 186 countries to the year 2100. To do this, IFs integrates multiple sub-models.
The Pardee Center uses IFs in partnership with governments, international governmental organizations, academic institutions, corporations, non-government organizations, and individual researchers and students.
2020–21 Year in Review
During the global pandemic, the Pardee Center successfully innovated updates to IFs, built new partnerships, and sustained existing partnerships. Read the full report to learn about our team's accomplishments.