Short answers, pulled from the story.
The World Resources Institute was established in 1982 by James Gustave Speth with funding from the MacArthur Foundation. The organization has since been led by Jonathan Lash (1993-2011), Andrew D. Steer (2012-2021), and current president Ani Dasgupta (2021-present).
Global Forest Watch is an open-source web application developed by WRI in partnership with Google Earth Engine in 2014. It uses Landsat satellite imagery to map forest changes worldwide and can detect deforestation events and fires down to a 30 square meter area, with weekly GLAD deforestation alerts and daily fire alerts.
WRI's revenue stood at $272 million in 2024. Major donors include the Bezos Earth Fund, which provided over $100 million to WRI's Land and Carbon Lab in 2021, and the Polsky Foundation, which gave $100 million jointly to WRI and the University of Chicago in 2025, with $75 million designated for the WRI Polsky Center for the Global Energy Transition.
Anil Agarwal, a former WRI council member (1988-1990), criticized a 1990 WRI study for allocating too much responsibility for global warming to developing countries and under-acknowledging U.S. overconsumption. He called the study an example of environmental colonialism and argued that a fairer analysis would balance each nation's emissions against its terrestrial carbon sinks.
WRI's Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) was established in 2015 to help companies set greenhouse gas emission reduction targets aligned with climate science. It is part of WRI's broader work on climate accountability alongside the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Climate Watch website.
WRI is active in over 50 countries and maintains international offices in Brazil, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. During 2014-2018, WRI received more than $63 million in funding from outside the United States, more than any other top-ranked think tank.