World Resources Institute

• 1. Introduction

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  The World Resources Institute was born in 1982 from a question that few institutions were asking yet: could the way humanity feeds, powers, and organizes itself be measured, mapped, and changed before it was too late? James Gustave Speth founded WRI with seed money from the MacArthur Foundation, and what began as a single organization has since grown into a body with offices across a dozen countries and an annual revenue of $272 million. The institute does not manufacture goods, govern territory, or enforce laws. Its primary tools are research, data, and the maps it shares with governments, corporations, and communities trying to navigate the pressures of a changing planet. What kinds of problems does WRI actually tackle? How did a think tank end up tracking deforestation to 30 meters and mapping ocean dead zones? And who pushed back against the organization's own assumptions about who bears responsibility for climate change? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Founding and Leadership

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  James Gustave Speth launched WRI with MacArthur Foundation funding, setting the organization on a path that subsequent leaders would extend and redirect. Jonathan Lash held the presidency from 1993 to 2011, a span that covered some of the most turbulent decades in international environmental policy. Andrew D. Steer followed from 2012 to 2021, and Ani Dasgupta took the role in 2021 and leads the institute today. WRI pursues a mission it states in its own words: to "move society to provide for the needs and aspirations of current and future generations." To do that, it partners with local and national governments, private companies, publicly held corporations, and other non-profits. The institute works across six domains: food, forests, water, energy, cities, and climate. Since the 1st of October 2008, Charity Navigator has given WRI a perfect four out of four stars, a rating it has held continuously since that date.

• 3. A Global Footprint

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  WRI maintains international offices in Brazil, China, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Mexico, the Netherlands, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and is active in over 50 countries. That geographic reach attracted scrutiny in a report by the Center for International Policy's Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative. Examining the top 50 think tanks on the University of Pennsylvania's Global Go-To Think Tanks index, the report found that during 2014-2018, WRI received more funding from outside the United States than any other organization on the list, totaling more than $63 million. The report's authors described this finding as "unsurprising" given how many countries WRI operates in. Large individual gifts have also shaped the institute's programs. In 2014, American real estate developer Stephen M. Ross gave $30 million to create the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities. In 2021, the Bezos Earth Fund provided over $100 million to WRI's Land and Carbon Lab. In 2025, Michael and Tanya Polsky, through the Polsky Foundation, contributed $100 million jointly to WRI and the University of Chicago; $75 million of that gift was designated to establish the WRI Polsky Center for the Global Energy Transition.

• 4. Forests, Data, and Deforestation

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  Beginning in 2002, WRI worked with the Cameroon Forest Initiative to integrate satellite imagery with data on agricultural terrain, boundaries, protected land, community-owned forests, and logging and mining concessions, turning scattered sources into digital and paper maps for tracking forest change. A decade later, WRI built on forest change analysis developed by Matthew C. Hansen at the University of Maryland, partnering with Google Earth Engine to launch Global Forest Watch in 2014. The open-source web application uses Landsat satellite imagery to map forest change worldwide. Its alerts can pinpoint events down to a 30 square meter area, with weekly GLAD deforestation alerts and daily fire alerts. Journalists, indigenous groups, governments, academic researchers, and private sector users all draw on the platform, including indigenous communities whose lands face direct threats. As of January 2021, WRI used Global Forest Watch to produce a forest carbon flux map covering data from 2001 to 2019, measuring emissions and removals of forest-related greenhouse gases at a 30-meter yearly resolution. That map confirmed that tropical forests both absorb more carbon and release more through deforestation and degradation than other forest types. WRI has also partnered with Google Earth Engine on Dynamic World, released in June 2022, a near real-time application that classifies land use and land cover including wetlands, forests, crops, and urban areas. Working with the Sustainability Consortium, WRI has identified industrially traded commodities including beef, soybeans, palm oil, corn, and cotton as dominant drivers of forest loss in South America and Southeast Asia.

• 5. Water, Oceans, and the Climate

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  In 2008, WRI reported on water quality worldwide, identifying over 400 dead zones caused by eutrophication, including areas in the Baltic Sea, the Chesapeake Bay, and Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Eutrophication results from phosphorus discharged in urban wastewater and from agricultural nutrient pollution. WRI publishes the Aqueduct Water Risk Atlas, which ranks countries by their exposure to severe water crises. On coral reefs, WRI published reports in 1998 and in 2011 tracking damage from coastal development, overfishing, climate change, and rising ocean acidity; a 2022 report examined reefs at a 500-meter resolution and analyzed the protection reefs provide to people, infrastructure, and national GDP. On climate, WRI worked with companies to develop the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a common standard for quantifying and managing greenhouse gas emissions. The Science Based Targets initiative, established in 2015, helps companies set emission reduction targets aligned with climate science. WRI also manages the Climate Watch website, formerly called the CAIT Climate Data Explorer, which allows journalists and others to examine greenhouse gas data by country and on a per capita basis. In 1997 and 2000, WRI published the first comparative study of material flow accounting, using time series data to assess all material inputs and outputs, excluding water, in industrial economies.

• 6. Criticism and Contested Responsibility

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  A 1990 WRI study drew a pointed challenge from Anil Agarwal, who had served on WRI's council from 1988 to 1990. Agarwal was among the first scholars to argue that concepts of social equity needed to be integrated into international climate policies. He accused WRI of placing too much of the blame for global warming on developing countries and of under-acknowledging how much U.S. overconsumption contributed to the problem. His label for the WRI study was stark: environmental colonialism. Agarwal proposed a different framework, one that would balance each nation's emissions against its terrestrial carbon sinks rather than treating emissions alone as the measure of guilt. The critique opened a wider debate about which methodologies are appropriate for allocating climate responsibility across nations, and it raised the profile of equity as a dimension that could not be separated from the science. That debate over who counts as responsible, and by what measure, remains a live question in international climate negotiations today. WRI itself has since developed tools like the Greenhouse Gas Protocol and the Science Based Targets initiative that grapple directly with how companies and countries should set and measure their reduction commitments.