WRI focuses on six urgent global challenges: cities, climate, energy, food, forests and water. This work is supported by four centers of excellence: business, economics, finance and governance. With partners, we develop strong evidence, create innovative, practical solutions and engage with communities, decision-makers and world leaders to achieve change at scale.
WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities continues to cement its reputation for shaping urban agendas and creating impact in cities. In 2016, WRI influenced elements of the New Urban Agenda of the UN Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III), an opportunity that comes only once every 20 years to shape the future of cities for the next generation.
WRI’s World Resources Report (WRR): Towards a More Equal City, which launched at Habitat III, was a key input to this process. There was broad consensus on WRR’s central idea: that prioritizing core urban services for the underserved can create prosperous, sustainable cities for all. The Center’s ongoing work has large-scale impact. For instance, through the Bloomberg Initiative for Global Road Safety, WRI improves safety through sustainable mobility and pedestrian conditions in 10 cities across the world. In India, WRI created safer pedestrian crossings and made Mumbai a more walkable city. WRI’s work informed efforts to recommend amendments in India’s Motor Vehicles Act of 1988, to consider the needs of all types of road users, pedestrians and bicyclists as well as vehicles. This has the potential to reduce traffic fatalities by 50 percent by 2020, saving 350,000 lives.
WRI’s Climate team leads groundbreaking analysis and works with trusted partners to advocate action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help make the world’s most vulnerable people more resilient to climate impacts.
Building on the 2015 Paris Agreement, WRI played a leading role in establishing the NDC Partnership, an international effort that now includes more than 50 countries and eight global institutions, which is dedicated to accelerating climate and development action. The WRI Climate team worked with more than 200 multinational corporations, large Indian companies and Chinese megacities to set ambitious targets to cut emissions, and created an aggressive climate agenda for the North American Leaders Summit. In the United States, the team offered recommendations on building communities’ climate resilience and fairly implementing a national carbon price, while making the case, privately and publicly, that the new administration’s goals for jobs and economic growth can best be advanced through investments in clean, climate-smart infrastructure.
WRI’s Energy program aims to make clean energy the most cost effective option for all consumers, from the poorest households to the largest corporations.
Working with a coalition of large multinational corporations and electric utilities in the U.S., the team helped develop more affordable, large-scale renewable energy options in places that lacked them before, leading to 450 megawatts of contracts in coal-intensive states. In India, we worked with influential consumers to increase their use of renewable energy and support the country’s renewable energy targets. WRI leads the Building Efficiency Accelerator, part of UN Sustainable Energy for All, working with 28 cities to increase energy efficiency policies and projects. The team developed market maps for India and Tanzania to help connect electricity solution providers and financiers to communities that lack access to energy services. Our research on finance and planning models will improve financing and policy support for these services.
WRI’s Food program advances solutions to feed a rapidly growing population, while promoting social and economic development and reducing pressure on the environment.
WRI and partners launched the Food Loss and Waste Accounting and Reporting Standard, enabling companies and countries to measure and report on food loss and waste. Together with the Dutch government, WRI created Champions 12.3, a coalition of leaders from government, business and civil society, to accelerate action to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals’ target for reducing food loss and waste. Shifting Diets for a Sustainable Food Future, the latest installment of the World Resources Report’s Creating a Sustainable Food Future series, shows how shifts toward plant-rich diets can significantly reduce agriculture’s pressure on the environment and improve human health. The research inspired WRI to launch the Better Buying Lab, which develops and tests cutting-edge strategies to enable consumers to buy and consume more sustainable foods.
WRI’s Forests program conducts research and develops online tools to help stakeholders understand what drives deforestation and forest degradation so they can take action to protect and monitor threatened forests and restore landscapes worldwide.
In 2016, governments in Peru, Mexico and Uganda, and civil society organizations in seven countries used Global Forest Watch to protect local forests. Global commodity buyers such as Mars, Unilever, Cargill, Mondelez and Olam used Global Forest Watch to address deforestation in their supply chains. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, WRI helped develop new rules allowing communities to obtain rights to manage their land. WRI worked with major companies to abate illegal logging in their supply chains through new technology and a better understanding of laws like the U.S. Lacey Act. African countries committed to restore more than 63 million hectares (156 million acres) of degraded land through the AFR100 partnership.
WRI's Water team provides research, data and cutting-edge analytical tools and solutions to pinpoint and minimize growing water risks that now affect more than a billion people worldwide.
WRI launched Global Forest Watch: Water, an online tool to help businesses, utilities and civil society groups assess where watersheds are at risk due to deforestation. Building on data from Aqueduct, WRI’s signature water risk management platform, the new tool eases access to vital information for managing and conserving forests and water. Empowered by WRI’s research and technical expertise, China began piloting waste-to-energy plants in 100 cities to slash emissions, boost wastewater treatment and provide a renewable source of energy. WRI also worked with a water-stressed region in China to design a program that will spur irrigation efficiency and free up water for economic and urban growth. In cities in Brazil and Mexico, the Water team began efforts to estimate the return on investment of watershed management. To help programs mitigate water risks, WRI released Protecting Drinking Water at the Source, a report that identifies critical factors for sustainable investments.
The Business Center works with multinational companies to help their businesses drive sustainable development.
Tomorrow’s Markets, a research project launched in 2016, is guiding the Business Center’s approach to private sector engagement. Based on the recognition that private sector impacts on natural resources will rise sharply as the global middle class expands, the project shows how corporations can tap these opportunities while preserving and enhancing resources for future generations.
WRI works directly with companies to put these principles into action. More than 200 companies have joined Science Based Targets, a joint initiative of WRI, CDP, WWF and the UN Global Compact, committing to greenhouse gas emission cuts that support global climate goals. A 2016 WRI working paper with Mars, Incorporated looks at how companies can comprehensively manage their impacts on land, water and climate to operate within planetary boundaries for decades to come.
The Economics Center supports WRI programs with rigorous economic analysis and leads the flagship New Climate Economy (NCE) project, for which WRI is the managing partner.
Working with the Governance Center, the Economics Center released a major report revealing the economic and environmental benefits of securing indigenous land rights in the Amazon. The NCE hosted the first Annual Summit of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate and published a flagship report on the imperative of financing sustainable infrastructure, laying out actions to deliver investment at scale. New research showed how Africa’s economic transformation could deliver long-term growth while reducing poverty and climate risk; detailed analysis on the economic benefits of green investments in Uganda fed into the Ugandan Finance Ministry’s Green Growth Strategy. The Coalition for Urban Transitions, a collaborative initiative with the WRI Ross Center and C40, was also launched to make the economic case for better urban development.
To shift global financial flows, the Finance Center works with governments and institutions to expand public and private investment in low-carbon, climate-resilient initiatives that avoid harm to people or the environment.
With research materials and peer-to-peer exchange, WRI is helping developing countries access finance from the Green Climate Fund. The Finance Center made recommendations to development finance institutions and governments on how to encourage the transition to renewable energy. Because progress on sustainable development and climate action must go together, WRI hosted a gathering of thought leaders to discuss aligning financing for the Sustainable Development Goals and climate change. WRI’s Sustainable Investing Initiative also hosted its second annual Sustainable Investing Forum, and at the end of 2016, published a working paper that highlights the landscape of drivers, barriers and strategies for sustainable investing.
WRI’s Governance Center helps protect the rights of the world’s most vulnerable citizens by empowering people and strengthening institutions to foster environmentally sound and socially equitable decision making.
In October 2016, WRI assumed the role of co-chair of the Open Government Partnership (OGP), a multilateral initiative that secures government commitments to increase civic participation, promote transparency and strengthen accountability. We identified climate action as a core priority for the Partnership and have worked with OGP’s 75 member countries to develop climate commitments, from building user-friendly environmental data platforms to increasing public participation in climate policymaking. The Center’s Land and Resource Rights project launched a groundbreaking report in partnership with the Economics Center, Climate Benefits, Tenure Costs: The Economic Case for Securing Indigenous Land Rights, that quantifies for the first time the economic value of protecting indigenous land rights in the Amazon Basin. It finds that modest investments in establishing tenure security will generate billions in economic, social and environmental returns.