What is the real price tag of delaying climate and nature action by another year—or another decade? 

The United Nations Environment Programme’s 7th Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) explores this question. Launched on December 9, 2025, at the seventh UN Environment Assembly (UNEA-7) in Nairobi, Kenya, GEO-7 is the most comprehensive scientific assessment of the global environment to date. Produced by 287 multidisciplinary scientists from 82 countries and reviewed by more than 800 experts and 56 review editors worldwide, the report reflects an effort of remarkable scale, ensuring scientific credibility and global representation.  

The price tag – measured in human and economic costs – of failing to achieve transformative change is steep. GEO-7 finds that continued environmental degradation will drive growing economic losses and could cost tens of millions of lives over the coming decades. Pollution, climate change, biodiversity loss, and land degradation are already leading to devastating environmental, economic, and human impacts. The outlook emphasizes that these crises are deeply interconnected and that addressing them will require integrated, system-wide solutions across regions and within national governments and societies.  

Crucially, GEO-7 underscores that this future is not inevitable. The report maps out two “Transformation Pathway” scenarios – alternative ways that societies might achieve global environmental goals while supporting economic prosperity. The technology-focused transformation focuses on technological development and efficiency gains. The behavior-focused transformation illuminates how shifts in values and material consumption patterns could drive change. Together, these pathways explore how structural change in energy, food systems, land use, materials and waste, and finance could alter long-term outcomes. 

Taylor Hanna, Associate Director of Development Analysis at the Pardee Institute, and Jonathan Moyer, Director of the Pardee Institute, served as lead authors on Chapters 10 and 11. These chapters map the global implications of the continuation of current trends (Chapter 10) and the pursuit of transformation pathways (Chapter 11). They draw on the Pardee Institute’s International Futures (IFs) model, used alongside other global environmental and economic models, to explore long-term trajectories for economic, agricultural, and energy indicators.  

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) call for global partnerships, recognizing that ending poverty is linked to progress in education, energy, and health. The IFs model suggests that under current trends, the world will achieve only modest well-being improvements and miss many SDG targets. Many will still lack basic needs, and disparities between high-income countries and others persist. This highlights an opportunity for countries to align strategies with sustainability and improve well-being. Scenario analysis shows where integrated policies can close gaps and foster inclusive progress. 

By contrast, the Transformation Pathways mapped out in GEO-7 suggest meaningful progress is possible –not only toward global climate goals and stronger economic growth, but also toward improved human well-being worldwide. In the modeling, these pathways lift more than 100 million people out of extreme poverty, 200 million out of hunger, and prevent 9 million premature deaths relative to Current Trends. 

This is the third GEO assessment to which the Pardee Institute and the IFs model have contributed, following earlier involvement in GEO-4 and GEO-6. By contributing to successive GEO assessments, the Pardee Institute continues to provide systems-based long-term analysis as part of a wider international effort to link environmental science with policy decisions. You can access the full GEO-7 report here and view background information, including press releases and the report timeline.  

United Nations Industrial Development Organization, 2025. Industrial Development Report 2026. The Future of Industrialization. Building Future-ready Industries for Sustainable Development. Vienna.

On November 26, 2025, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) launched their Industrial Development Report (IDR) at the Global Industry Summit in Riyadh. The Pardee Institute supported IDR 2026 by providing forecasts and scenario analysis to explore industrial development scenarios out to 2050 and assess how developing countries could leverage an Industrial Push to advance economic and human development. The following Pardee Institute experts supported the production of this edition of the report: Taylor Hanna, Abdelrahman Ibrahim, Collin J. Meisel, José Solórzano, Yutang Xiong, Solikha Makhmatova and Victoria Pepera.

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

What is our purpose? Who do we serve? How do we know we are making an impact?

These questions guided the Pardee Institute's 2025 strategic planning cycle, enabling us to strengthen our value system and establish a framework for fulfilling our mission and achieving our vision during uncertain times.

Building on the foundation of its predecessor 2020 five-year plan, this plan honors the continuing core identity of the Institute, staying rooted in what makes our work distinctive and useful, and distilled for practicality and purpose.

The Pardee Institute 2025 Strategic Plan, launched in the Fall of 2025, details our primary motivations and our approach to strategic planning. It connects our institutional history to our vision for its future, explains the intention behind our mission, vision, values, and high-level strategic goals for this cycle, and reflects on our current position relative to these goals, as well as possible pathways to realize them.

Here, we are pleased to share our strategic plan, which serves as our statement of purpose and decision-making framework through 2030.

Meisel, C. (2025, August 21). Right-sizing Africa’s “China challenge”. ISS African Futures. https://futures.issafrica.org/blog/2025/Right-sizing-Africas-China-challenge

Annual Update for the Pardee Institute for International Futures, 2024-2025.

The International Futures (IFs) forecasting system is central to much of the Pardee Institute’s work, constantly helping us to understand, explore, and communicate the complex reality in which we live and the alternative futures that might be brought into being. This report features an introduction to our 2025 Strategic Plan, an in-depth look at our areas of research, highlights of the student experience at Pardee, and a detailed list of events, presentations, and publications from this past year.

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.

Sahadevan, D., Irfan, M. T., Luo, C., Moyer, J. D., Mason, C., & Beynon, E. (2025). Charged for change: The case for renewable energy in climate action. UNDP; Pardee Institute for International Futures; Octopus Energy.

United Nations. 2024. Global Risk Report. New York: United Nations.

The Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures conducted a detailed, risk-by-risk assessment to refine the initial list of over 100 risks identified for the report. This assessment involved defining each risk, reviewing existing literature, estimating the likelihood of each risk by 2050, and analyzing potential impacts. Furthermore, modeling data from the Pardee Institute's International Futures (IFs) integrated modeling framework was used to strengthen the robustness of the foresight scenarios presented in the report.