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The U.S. Renewable Energy Map: A Guide for Corporate Buyers answers the question, "where is there opportunity to purchase large-scale renewable energy from utilities across the United States?" By identifying these opportunities...
The traffic congestion and its high socioeconomic cost, brought by China’s fast urbanization, has forced the demand for congestion mitigation and emission reduction in the transport sector onto the government’s agenda. Several Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou and Suzhou are...
The Climate Access Indicators Tool (CAIT) Equity Explorer (WRI 2014), part of WRI’s CAIT Climate Data Explorer suite, is an online visualization tool that aims to inform the UNFCCC international climate negotiations by providing a unique approach to climate equity. This technical note discusses...
The Elephant in the Boardroom: Why Unchecked Consumption is Not an Option in Tomorrow’s Markets is a new working paper from WRI that can guide discussion within companies about an uncomfortable truth: many of today’s business models are not fit for tomorrow’s resource-strained world....
The clean energy economy in the United States—including wind, solar, and efficiency industries—is putting more and more Americans to work. This fact sheet outlines the latest data on how many Americans are working in clean energy and where the jobs are located.
Global demand for timber, agricultural commodities, and extractives is a significant driver of deforestation worldwide. Transparent land-concessions data for these large-scale commercial activities are essential to understand drivers of forest loss, monitor environmental impacts of ongoing...
Rapid urbanization in China has substantially increased the quantity of liquid waste in municipalities, and has simultaneously engendered massive investments in wastewater conveyance and treatment. This increase in the number of wastewater treatment plants has generated a sharp rise in the...
Restoring the ecological health of the Chesapeake Bay will require reducing nutrient pollution in urban stormwater runoff. Planning, designing, and constructing the local stormwater management projects that are needed will take many years and be very expensive. Implementing nutrient trading in...
This study assesses the impacts of different water sources (including surface water, groundwater, water transfer and desalination and wastewater reclamation) on the energy consumption of municipal water supply systems. Through the scenario analysis, the report also provides recommendations for...
Multilateral climate funds play a key role in using public finance to help drive the economic and societal transformation necessary to address climate change. There is growing pressure for policymakers to make the architecture of funds more effective and coherent. This report examines seven key...
China’s cities face significant challenges in financing the growth of urban transit infrastructure. The current practice of financing urban metro or subway projects through municipal fiscal revenues (partly from land concession fees) and government-backed bank loans is not only inadequate to...
Many restoration projects seek to raise capital, but restoration leaders often lack knowledge of the investment process. The New Restoration Economy—part of the Global Restoration Initiative at the World Resources Institute—has found that successful efforts to attract private capital involve...
Access to electricity is recognized as fundamental to development, and many efforts are under way across developing countries to scale up access, both in terms of providing basic supply and enabling people to move up through the energy tiers. However, it has become apparent that providing a...
Transit-oriented development (TOD)—a planning strategy focused on building compact, mixed-use neighborhoods with access to high-quality public transport and mobility options—is key to sustainable urbanization. However, TOD can be exclusive in its design and implementation, leading to the...
Various organizations have published forecasts of the economic impacts of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), EPA’s regulation that limits carbon dioxide emissions from power plants, with studies arriving at markedly different conclusions about the effect of the policy on electricity affordability and...
The Transport Emissions & Social Cost Assessment is a project under the World Resources Institute’s Sustainable and Livable Cities Program, funded by the Caterpillar Foundation. The project aims to develop a methodology guide, with a simple MS Excel– based tool, to estimate transport...
Countries around the world have set greenhouse gas targets, but they have taken different forms, from reductions in historical emissions to reductions relative to projected business-as-usual scenarios or the emissions intensity of the economy. In many cases, countries have not explicitly stated...
A new paper by World Resources Institute finds strong interest and opportunities for sustainable investing within the US institutional investor marketplace. But key barriers persist.
A survey of over 100 investment professionals shows that institutional investors – including pensions,...
The solution to the challenge of financing the scale-up of Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) energy access lies not so much in the development of new initiatives but in the use and redirection of existing approaches for PAYG, particularly the use of credit guarantees, lines of credit, technical assistance,...
This paper presents a roadmap of eight priority federal policy opportunities that build on the recommendations from the 2015 Rising Tides Summit, a first-of-its-kind bipartisan gathering of nearly 40 U.S. mayors and local elected officials from 18 of the 23 coastal U.S. states. The policy...
