The founders of the World Resources Institute (WRI) were aware of the urgent need for research and solutions to the many serious global environmental, resource, population and development problems around the world. The most serious of the world’s environmental threats—deforestation, desertification, and global climate change must head any list—are not the problems to which the United States and other industrial countries turned priority attention when environmental concerns emerged forcefully in the 1960s and 1970s. While these serious threats have been recognized for some time, they represent new policy and political challenges for the United States and many other countries, challenges that are more global in scope and international in implication. In this sense they are, indeed, a new agenda.

To address these issues, WRI’s founders saw the need for an institution that would be independent and broadly credible, not as an activist environmental membership organization, and that would carry out policy research and analysis on global environmental and resource issues and their relationship to population and development goals. That research and analysis had to be both scientifically sound and politically practical. It had to command the respect of the scientific community and the attention of the key decision-makers in both the public and private sectors, in this country and abroad. The institution would not duplicate, but draw on the expertise already in place in academic and other centers here and abroad. Yet it would produce work that policy-makers would find useful and realistic, and it would lead the way in trying to build the constituencies—both public and private—required to act on its analyses and recommendations.

The Institute was launched June 3, 1982 when the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation of Chicago announced it “will provide $15 million to help finance the first five years of operation of a newly created not-for-profit organization,”…the World Resources Institute, will be “a major center for policy research and analysis addressed to global resource and environmental issues.” It was organized as a nonprofit Delaware corporation that could receive tax-deductible gifts and contributions under the U.S. Internal Revenue Code.

The Institute’s first president was James Gustave Speth, former chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality and currently dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in New Haven, CT. He held this position until January 1993. Jonathan Lash is the current president.

El Instituto de Recursos Mundiales (WRI)
En el Instituto de Recursos Mundiales (WRI) estamos convencidos de que un medio ambiente saludable puede coexistir con una economía sólida. Desde 1982 hemos utilizado la información y el conocimiento como herramientas para encauzar a la sociedad humana hacia formas de vida que protejan el medio ambiente de la Tierra y su capacidad de satisfacer las necesidades y aspiraciones de las generaciones presentes y futuras.

Lideramos con ideas y persuadimos con soluciones prácticas. Para cumplir nuestra misión realizamos investigación y difundimos opciones sobre políticas, promovemos la adopción de enfoques innovadores y prestamos un sólido apoyo técnico a gobiernos, corporaciones, instituciones internacionales y ONG ambientalistas.

En todo nuestro trabajo sobre políticas con otras instituciones, tratamos de tender puentes entre las ideas y la acción, entretejiendo los hallazgos de la investigación científica, los análisis económicos e institucionales y la experiencia práctica con la necesidad de contar con un proceso de toma de decisiones abierto y participativo. Forjamos esfuerzos colaborativos con la gente que tendrá que vivir con las soluciones que promovemos, con los responsables por la toma de decisiones y con el sector privado.

Entre las áreas de trabajo actuales de WRI figuran la economía, los bosques, la biodiversidad, el cambio de clima, la agricultura sostenible, la información sobre recursos naturales y medio ambiente, el comercio, la tecnología, las estrategias nacionales de gestión ambiental y de recursos naturales, el enlace con las empresas y la salud humana.

Como organización de caridad y exenta de impuestos bajo la sección 501c(3) del código del Internal Revenue Service, WRI puede recibir donaciones de fundaciones de caridad; asimismo, los obsequios y dádivas por parte de individuos y corporaciones están libres de impuestos tanto para nosotros como para los contribuyentes, sean estos individuos o firmas.