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Frederick S. Pardee
Institute for International Futures
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What makes long-term scenario analysis useful?

International Futures (IFs) gives researchers, students, and decision-makers an empirical structure for testing assumptions about how global systems may change over time.
Pardee's dedicated, multidisciplinary team of researchers, modelers, developers, and data managers keeps Pardee’s flagship International Futures modeling platform technically reliable, methodologically transparent, and useful for research, teaching, and policy analysis. The team updates data and methods, strengthens model submodules, improves documentation and usability, and contributes to the scholarship that helps IFs-based analysis remain credible and open to scrutiny.

This work underpins much of Pardee’s development analysis, geopolitical analysis, academic research, classroom teaching, and partner engagement. It helps users examine how assumptions, structural trends, and policy choices may shape outcomes over time without treating any single forecast as inevitable.

Use IFs

Transparent modeling makes assumptions visible, scenarios testable, and long-term choices easier to examine.

IFs in scholarship

IFs draws strength from the academic work that tests, applies, and refines its methods. The peer-reviewed studies below show how researchers use IFs to examine connected systems and long-term change.
IFs gains value through use, scrutiny and refinement. These publications show how researchers have applied IFs to examine connected systems, test assumptions, and study plausible futures across climate, development, poverty, geopolitics, and human well-being.
That transparency matters most when IFs is tested, applied and scrutinized beyond Pardee. Peer-reviewed scholarship and research-facing publications show how IFs-based analysis helps researchers examine plausible futures across development, climate, conflict, poverty, energy and geopolitical change.

Explore all scholarly works

IFs in global conversations

Scholarship is one way IFs is tested. IFs also develops through exchange with the communities that use, test and compare long-term scenarios. The team participates in academic networks, global forums and scenario-building processes that help refine assumptions, improve methods and connect IFs-based analysis to wider conversations about development, climate, governance and geopolitical change.

These engagements create opportunities to compare approaches, learn from other modeling groups, understand user needs and make IFs more useful to communities studying plausible futures. They also help connect Pardee’s model development work to the broader research and policy environments where long-term assumptions are debated and applied.

Examples include scenario and foresight communities where researchers and practitioners compare assumptions, methods, and long-term pathways.
They also reflect a simple premise: long-term analysis is more useful when it is shaped by the questions, constraints, and expertise of the people who will use it. We welcome partnerships that bring new questions, data, methods and applications into conversation with IFs.
Interested in using IFs, contributing to model development or exploring a scenario-based research question with our team?

Connect with our team

How we develop and sustain IFs

Behind each publication, project, and partnership is sustained technical and methodological work. IFs is not a static tool; it requires ongoing development, testing, documentation, and interpretation. The International Futures team maintains the platform, updates historical data, refines methods, strengthens model submodules, and improves the tools that help users understand the model’s structure. 

Core activities include:

Maintain and modernize the platform

Improve performance, reliability, and long-term viability so IFs remains usable for analysts, students, researchers, and partners.

Update data and methods

Refresh historical data, align assumptions with current evidence, and refine methods as new research and global conditions emerge.

Strengthen connected submodules

Develop and improve model components across systems such as demography, economics, education, health, energy, environment, governance, infrastructure, agriculture, and international relations.

Document assumptions and structure

Maintain model documentation, interface guidance, and explanatory tools that help users understand how IFs represents variables, relationships, assumptions, and scenario results.

Improve usability and interpretation

Enhance interfaces, visual tools, and user support so more people can navigate IFs and interpret results with confidence.

Advance methodological scholarship

Publish and collaborate on research that tests, applies, and extends IFs-based scenario analysis.

What is International Futures?

International Futures (IFs) is Pardee’s open-source, integrated forecasting platform. It supports scenario-based analysis across connected human, social, natural, economic, and geopolitical systems.

IFs helps users examine how assumptions and structural trends may shape plausible futures across countries, regions and time horizons. It does not predict a single future. It provides a transparent framework for comparing pathways, testing assumptions and understanding trade-offs.

IFs includes:
  • 5,000+ historical series
  • Interconnected, macro-level variables
  • Across human, social, and natural systems
  • 188 countries in one-year time steps
  • From 2022 through 2100 and beyond

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