Moyer J., Meisel C., Szymanski-Burgos A., Scott A., Casiraghi M., Kurkul A., Hughes M., Kettlun W., McKee K., Matthews A., (2025). When Heads of Government and State (HOGS) Fly: Introducing the Country and Organizational Leader Travel (COLT) Dataset Measuring Foreign Travel by HOGS, International Studies Quarterly, Volume 69, Issue 2, June 2025, sqaf013, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqaf013

February 04, 2025

Andrijevic, M., Zimm, C., Moyer, J.D., Muttarak, R., et al. 2025. Representing gender inequality in scenarios improves understanding of climate challenges. Nature Climate Change, 15, 138–146. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-02242-5

Achieving gender equality can increase societies’ capacities to deal with climate change. Here we highlight empirical connections between gender equality and climate change adaptation and mitigation to propose a structured and detailed inclusion of gender-related aspects in the Shared Socioeconomic Pathway framework. The introduction of hypothetical pathways of gender (in)equality in the scenario space can help analyse interactions with other socioeconomic drivers and subsequent implications for adaptation and mitigation options. The extent of challenges to climate change adaptation and mitigation may substantially change depending on the rate at which societies progress towards equal access to resources and opportunities for self-realization for all genders. We propose steps that the scenario community could take to enrich the next generation of socioeconomic pathways.

Solórzano, J., Hughes, B., Irfan, M., Xiong, Y., Kwasi, S., Ibrahim, A., Makhamatova, S., Hanna, T., Moyer, J. (2024). Protocol for making forecasts exogenous in the International Futures model. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xpro.2024.103414

Understanding future dynamics and trends in human and natural development is foundational for creating appropriate policy strategies to address planetary and development challenges. Here, we present a protocol for adding exogenous series for key variables, such as the shared socioeconomic pathways, to the database of the International Futures (IFs) integrated model. We describe steps for installing IFs and the SQLiteStudio software, understanding the IFs database, importing series, running the model, and extracting results.
For complete details on the use and execution of this protocol, please refer to Moyer.

Abu, T., Achore, M., Irfan, M., Musah, I., Azzika, T. (2024). The past, present, and future of Ghana’s WASH sector. An explorative analysis. Water Security. 23. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasec.2024.100185

Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH) are fundamental to human health and development. Initiatives like the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) propelled WASH inequities to the forefront of development. Several countries have undergone reforms to ensure universal access to WASH. Using Ghana as a case study, we traced the evolutionary path of Ghana’s WASH sector highlighting persistent socio-ecological and political-economic factors shaping the current WASH sector reforms and access. We then engage in an integrated assessment modelling to examine the viability and implications of achieving targets of SDG 6 using the International Futures simulation. We find a more feasible pathway to achieving universal WASH access should prioritize eradicating open defecation and surface water use often experienced in rural and urban slums.

Full Citation: Meisel, C. J., Moyer, J. D., Matthews, A. S., Kaplan, O., Byrnes, R., Benjumea, K., Cribb, P., & Van Son, C. (2024). Bearing witness: Introducing the Perceived Mass Atrocities Dataset (PMAD). Journal of Peace Research

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00223433241249333

Led by Pardee's Associate Director of Geopolitical Analysis, Collin Meisel, and commissioned by the US State Department to support the Elie Weisel Act, this coding framework is a prime example of the Institute's goal to bridge the gap between academic work and policy-making communities. Congratulations to all of the hard-working Korbel students who contributed to this impressive research and all the co-authors on this outstanding accomplishment.

Abstract:

The risk factors and consequences of atrocities are deeply interconnected with questions of intra- and interstate stability and conflict, economic development, colonialism, and gender equality, as well as atrocity crime monitoring and prevention. However, there is no globally comparable measure of lethal and less-lethal atrocities. The Perceived Mass Atrocities Dataset (PMAD) is a country-year measure of atrocities with accompanying narratives. Built to support the US Congress’s Elie Wiesel Genocide and Atrocities Prevention Act of 2018, PMAD enables the systematic comparison of the occurrence and magnitude of seven atrocity types, in addition to group-perpetrated violence against women and LGBTQIA+ groups, with aggregate atrocities indices for 196 countries from 2018 to 2022. PMAD offers a foundation for quantitative studies of atrocities as well as more qualitative, process-focused research of lethal and less-lethal violence with its single, divisible framework. The PMAD data highlight several regions where analysis of atrocities using data on only lethal atrocities would be inadequate, especially Central and Eastern Asia. The data can also facilitate research into the relationships between mass atrocities and gender discrimination, neopatrimonialism, and political polarization.

Full Citation: Hanna, T.; Hughes, B.B.; Irfan, M.T.; Bohl, D.K.; Solórzano et al., Sustainable Development Goal Attainment in the Wake of COVID-19: Simulating an Ambitious Policy Push. Sustainability 2024, 16, 3309. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16083309

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the world was not on course to meet key Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) including SDG 1 (No Poverty) and SDG 2 (Zero Hunger). Some significant degree of additional effort was needed before the pandemic, and the challenge is now greater. Analyzing the prospects for meeting these goals requires attention to the combined effects of the pandemic and such additional impetus. This article assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on progress toward the SDGs and explores strategies to recover and accelerate development. Utilizing the International Futures (IFs) forecasting system and recognizing the near impossibility of meeting the goals by 2030, three scenarios are examined through to 2050: A pre-COVID-19 trajectory (No COVID-19), the current path influenced by the pandemic (Current Path), and a transformative SDG-focused approach prioritizing key policy strategies to accelerate outcomes (SDG Push). The pandemic led to a rise in extreme poverty and hunger, with recovery projected to be slow. The SDG Push scenario effectively addresses this, surpassing the Current Pathand achieving significant global improvements in poverty, malnutrition, and human development by 2050 even relative to the No COVID-19 path. The findings emphasize the need for integrated, transformative actions to propel sustainable development.

By: Moyer, J. D. (2024). A double-edged sword into a plowshare: Analyzing geopolitical implications of alternative socioeconomic development pathways. One Earth. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oneear.2024.01.002

The summary discusses global challenges to sustainable development, emphasizing the need to balance human development, climate change, and geopolitics. It focuses on the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs),which are scenarios used in climate research to address adaptation and mitigation challenges. Using the International Futures model, the study examines the implications of alternative socioeconomic development on the future distribution of national power and international relations. The findings suggest that a sustainable development pathway may lead to geopolitical destabilization, causing transitions in regional and global power. The paper highlights the importance of integrating international relations drivers into SSPs and urges policymakers to consider both promoting sustainable development and addressing implications for geopolitical development.

By: Burgess, M. G., Leaf Van Boven, Wagner, G., Wong‐Parodi, G., Baker, K., Boykoff, M., Converse, B. A., Dilling, L., Gilligan, J. M., Yoel Inbar, Markowitz, E. M., Moyer, J. D., Newton, P. W., Raimi, K. T., Shrum, T. R., & Vandenbergh, M. P. (2024).

The United States recently passed major federal laws supporting the energy transition. Analyses suggest that their successful implementation could reduce US emissions more than 40% below 2005 levels by 2030. However, achieving maximal emissions reductions would require frictionless supply and demand responses to the laws’ incentives and implementation that avoids polarization and efforts to repeal or undercut them. In this Perspective, we discuss some of these supply, demand and polarization challenges. We highlight insights from social science research, and identify open questions needing answers, regarding how to address these challenges. The stakes are high. The success of these new laws could catalyse virtuous cycles in the energy transition; their failure could breed cynicism about major government spending on climate change.

By: Moyer, J. D., Matthews, A. S., Evans, J., McPhee, J., & Kettlun, W. (2023). Do Safety Expectations Affect the Location Strategies of Large Service Delivery INGOs? International Interactions, 1–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/03050629.2023.2279616

Large service-delivery international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) help shape the lives of millions worldwide, contributing significantly to the betterment of global health, development, education, and more. However, these organizations operate on limited financial resources and must deliver services on-the-ground, requiring them to make calculated decisions about their location strategies for operations. Although these INGOs should aim to maximize their efforts by operating in countries with the greatest need, sometimes they may face challenges from political conditions in these environments. Do safety expectations in countries affect the assistance allocation decisions of large service delivery INGOs? We explore this question using new data on the location and operational-intensity of country-level projects across 90 of the largest service delivery INGOs worldwide between 1990 and 2015. We find that these INGOs do send greater operational resources to countries demonstrating need and that INGOs are not necessarily afraid to operate in countries with safety risks. However, large INGOs do send far fewer service operations to autocracies, suggesting that political factors affect their location strategies as well.

By: Moyer, J. D., Pirzadeh, A., Irfan, M., Solórzano, J. R., Stone, B. A., Xiong, Y., Hanna, T., & Hughes, B. B. (2023).

Fossil fuel-based economic development both causes climate change and contributes to poverty alleviation, creating tensions across societal efforts to maintain growth, limit climate damage, and improve human development. While many studies explore key aspects of this dilemma, few direct attention to the pathways from climate change through socioeconomic development to the future of poverty. We build on projections of global temperature change (representative concentration pathways) and country-specific economic development (economic growth and income distribution across the shared socioeconomic pathways) to model how climate change may affect future poverty with the International Futures (IFs) model, projecting poverty across income thresholds for 175 countries through 2070. Central tendency scenarios with climate effects compared with scenarios that do not model climate change show that climate change-attributable extreme poverty will grow to 25 million people by 2030 (range: 18 to 30), 40 million by 2050 (range: 9 to 78), and 32 million by 2070 (range: 4 to 130) though overall levels of global poverty decline. If climatic tipping points are passed, the climate-attributable extreme poverty grows to 57 million people by 2030 (range: 40–72), 78 million by 2050 (range: 18–193), and 56 million by 2070 (range: 7–306). To mitigate baseline effects of climate change on extreme poverty, an improvement of global income inequality of 10% is required (range: 5–15%).