World Resources Institute WRI articles

Cities Safer by Design is a global reference guide to help cities save lives from traffic fatalities through improved street design and smart urban development. Over 1.2 million people die in traffic crashes globally, mostly pedestrians, and that number is growing every year. This hands-on guide taps examples from cities worldwide and includes 34 different design elements to improve safety and quality of life.

This report is made possible through funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies.

This report analyzes water availability across all potentially commercial shale resources worldwide.It also reveals that water availability could limit shale resource development on every continent except Antarctica.

Shale resources are unevenly distributed worldwide and, for the most part, not located where freshwater is abundant. For example, China, Mexico, and South Africa have some of the largest technically recoverable shale gas resources (based on estimates from the U.S. Energy

With the launch of Global Forest Watch (GFW), anyone with an internet connection can now access troves of timely, high-quality information about where, when, and why forests are changing worldwide. The free, online monitoring system provides the open data and transparency necessary to improve forest management and e

“Big data” has never been bigger. New tools—such as satellites, cloud computing, and other technological upgrades—are fueling a “data revolution,” allowing researchers to analyze the world in ways they’ve never been able to before.

But while compiling and analyzing this data is

Population growth and rapid urbanization are combining to create huge challenges for Indian cities. According to McKinsey, the country’s cities are expected to grow from 340 million people in 2008 to a whopping 590 million in 2030. Meeting demand for urban services in these cities will require

The governor of Indonesia’s Riau province issued a state of emergency last week as thick haze blanketed large areas of the region, closing down schools and airports. According to local officials, more than 22,000 people

The U.S. currently finds itself in the midst of an energy boom, driven by technological advances in the extraction of oil and natural gas. Our domestic energy resources, and the self-sufficiency they can bring, are the envy of much of the world. Yet we must also weigh the consequences of our actions on the natural environment; the decisions we are making will have long-lasting impacts on air quality, water scarcity, and the climate. We can balance economic growth and reductions in greenhouse

People and economies across the Caribbean are dependent on coastal ecosystems—including coral reefs, mangroves, and beaches. These ecosystems provide critical habitat to commercial fisheries, attract tourists from around the world, and protect coastal communities and infrastructure from the ravages of tropical storms.

But despite their importance, these ecosystems are under threat from overfishing, pollution, coastal development, and other human p

More than 70 percent of the world’s population will live in cities by 2050. So cities represent the single-greatest opportunity for targeted, meaningful actions that create impact on the ground, improve the quality of life for billions of people, and reduce the risks of climate change.

This opportunity was a key theme at last week’s

The Green Climate Fund (GCF) has big ambitions: It aspires to become the main global fund for providing climate change finance, contributing to activities like the design of resilient cities and the expansion of low-emission power generation. However, it faces crucial questio