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Frederick S. Pardee
Institute for International Futures
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IFs Methodology and Development

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 multidisciplinary team keeps IFs 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 scholarship that makes IFs-based analysis easier to test and scrutinize. This work underpins much of Pardee’s development analysis, geopolitical analysis, academic research, classroom teaching, and partner engagement.
Transparent modeling makes assumptions visible, scenarios testable, and long-term choices easier to examine.

IFs in scholarship

One way that transparency becomes useful is through scrutiny. IFs draws strength from the academic work that tests, applies, and refines its methods.  
Peer-reviewed studies show how IFs can be tested, applied, and refined across research questions. The examples below use IFs to examine climate, development, poverty, geopolitics, and human well-being while making assumptions and methods available for scrutiny.
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

"The art of long-term planning requires the solidity and flexibility of good model-building. In choosing a model to guide the analytical and prospective work of CEPLAN, Peru's National Strategic Center, we set quite a stringent set of criteria. The IFs model, developed at the Pardee Center, bested all other models we analyzed by a least a mile."
Carlos A. Anderson
Former President, CEPLAN

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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