IFs Purposes

International Futures (IFs) is a tool for thinking about long-term country-specific, regional and global futures. Although it is increasingly used in policy analysis, it began as an educational tool. Even in analysis applications the primary strengths of the system are in framing investigation and analysis. Users of computer simulations should always treat the forecasts as highly contingent scenarios, not as predictions.

IFs assists with:

  • Understanding the state of the world

    • Exploring trends and considering where they might be taking us
    • Learning about the dynamics of global systems

  • Thinking about the future we want to see

    • Clarifying goals/priorities
    • Developing alternative scenarios (if-then statements) about the future
    • Investigating the leverage various agent-classes may have in shaping the future

A number of assumptions underlie the development of IFs. First, issues touching human development systems are growing in scope and scale as human interaction and human impact on the broader environment grow. This does not mean the issues are necessarily becoming more threatening or fundamentally insurmountable than in past eras. But it does mean that attention to the issues must have a global perspective, as well as local and regional ones.

Second, goals and priorities for human systems are becoming clearer and are more frequently and consistently enunciated. For instance, the UN Millennium Summit and the 2002 conference in Johannesburg (UNDP 2001: 21-24; UNDP 2002: 13-33) set specific goals for 2015 that include many focusing on the human condition, including:

  • Reducing by ½ the proportion of the world's population living on less than $1 a day (at 1993 PPP); about 1.2 billion people live at this level, with about 2.8 billion on less than $2 per day.
  • Reducing by ½ the proportion of the world's people without access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation (about 1.1 and 2.4 billion, respectively, in 2000).
  • Achieving universal completion of primary schooling (from 84% in 1998) and achieving gender equality in access to education
  • Reducing maternal mortality ratios by three-quarters (about 500,000 die each year in pregnancy and childbirth)
  • Reducing under-five mortality rates by two-thirds (about 11 million die of preventable causes each year).
  • Halting and beginning to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other major diseases (40 million carried HIV at the end of 2000).
  • Developing a global partnership for development (perhaps doubling official development assistance of about $56 billion annually).

Such goals are increasingly guiding a sense of collective human opportunity and responsibility. Also, our ability to measure the human condition relative to these and other goals has improved enormously in recent years with advances in data and measurement.

Third, understanding of the dynamics of human systems is growing rapidly. As discussed later, IFs development has roots that go back to the 1970s. Understandings of the systems included in the IFs model are remarkably more sophisticated now than they were then.

Fourth, and derivatively, the domain of human choice and action is broadening. As the scope and scale of interaction increase, goals become clearer, and understanding of underlying systems grows, the potential for useful human intervention increases. The law of unanticipated consequences has by no means been repealed, but the ability of human intervention to achieve human goals has increased. The reason for the creation of IFs is to help in thinking about such intervention and its consequences.