08/13/2026
Earlier this summer, Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures Director Jonathan Moyer traveled to Geneva to participate in the World Economic Forum’s Global Foresight Network, where he was invited to bring a quantitative perspective to an international gathering of foresight practitioners from governments, international organizations and the private sector.
Foresight often uses qualitative methods to help decision-makers imagine possible futures, surface assumptions and plan under uncertainty. Moyer’s contribution centered on how International Futures (IFs), Pardee’s open-source, integrated forecasting platform, can complement that work.
IFs does not predict a single future. It helps users examine plausible pathways under different assumptions and trace how changes in one system may affect others over time.
For foresight practitioners, integrated modeling can help provide an empirical backbone for scenario work. Qualitative approaches can expand what decision-makers imagine; quantitative tools can help test those assumptions against durable trends and connected systems, from demographics and economics to governance, health, infrastructure, energy and international relations.
The discussion reflected a core question in future-oriented planning: How do we hold uncertainty and evidence together?
For Pardee, the Geneva gathering connected our work with practitioners helping institutions think more clearly about what may change, what may endure and how choices made today could shape outcomes across systems.
