News
Update: October 2012
Pardee Center representative goes to Washington for Oxfam America, IFPRI meetings
On October 11, Dale Rothman joined representatives from the Institute for Alternative Futures (IAF) for a meeting at Oxfam America in Washington, DC. The gathering kicked-off the scenario component of Oxfam's Future of Agriculture project. Participants will work together to develop a set of narratives and quantitative scenarios related to agriculture and food justice in Peru. The Pardee Center hopes to contribute significantly to the development of the quantitative scenarios and will also play a small role in constructing the narratives.
Dale spent the following day in Washington at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). He met with Siwa Msangi, IFPRI’s senior research fellow in the Environment and Production Technology Division. Siwa helped develop the International Model for Policy Analysis of Agricultural Commodities and Trade (IMPACT). The Pardee Center has collaborated with IMPACT in the past and will hopefully do so again in the future.
Updates from the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative
Pardee Center Research Assistant Hanna Camp continues her internship at the Atlantic Council’s Strategic Foresight Initiative (SFI), where she participates in several projects related to long-term global policy. First, she’s been helping to publicize the Global Trends 2030 report, a joint project of the SFI and the National Intelligence Council (NIC) that uses International Futures analysis and scenarios. The report will be used, in part, to jumpstart a global conversation about world megatrends, such as accelerated population aging, the power shift from West to East, and food and water insecurity. She’s been using social media to attract global attention to the report ahead of its launch at a conference in December.
Hanna is also working on Urban World 2030 and Tech World 2030, workshop series that teach U.S. government analysts and policymakers about the effects of the coming increases in urbanization and emerging technologies. And in early October, she introduced IFs to the SFI website, where she’s been posting specific issue-area forecasts directly from the model. You can view the model and forecasts at www.acus.org and follow SFI’s work on Twitter via @ACforesight.
IFs team delivers provincial model for South Africa’s Western Cape
On Oct. 31, after months of hard work, the Pardee Center, in collaboration with the Institute for Security Studies, delivered an International Futures provincial model to the Western Cape Provincial Government in South Africa. This provincial model is part of an on-going effort to represent the history and future of development within the Western Cape province. The project, which is largely a sub-national version of IFs, required literal months of data collection and evaluation, along with much experimenting and vetting of the model. According to Pardee Center Research Assistant Mickey Rafa, who has spent the fall quarter in Cape Town preparing the model, the deliverable marked “the culmination of a tremendous amount of hard work from the team.” He and the rest of the Pardee Center are eager to begin the training phase of the project in December.
Pardee Center podcast available on iTunes
The Pardee Center’s Interim Associate Director Jonathan Moyer was featured as a “special guest” on ipadio.com, a social podcasting site. During his 25-minute interview, Moyer explains forecasting, the IFs model, and the center’s other on-going projects, such as the newly updated BuzzChurn. You can download his podcast using the ipadio app, available on iTunes.
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