World Resources Institute
US 501(c)(3) nonprofit research and policy organization. Operates the Global Forest Watch (GFW) and GFW Pro platforms as the distribution layer for third-party deforestation alert systems (GLAD, RADD, DIST-ALERT, JJ-FAST). Not a satellite operator and not an alert algorithm producer.
World Resources Institute (WRI) is a Washington, D.C.-based independent nonprofit research organization, incorporated under US law as a 501(c)(3) with EIN 52-1257057. Founded in 1982 with MacArthur Foundation support, WRI studies and advances sustainable practices across food, forests, water, energy, cities, and climate policy. As of fiscal year 2024, WRI reported total revenues of $267 million and employs over 2,000 staff across offices in 12 countries.[^propublica-990][^wri-about]
In the Earth observation ecosystem, WRI functions as a platform operator and programme manager rather than a satellite operator or sensor-data producer. Its principal EO-facing product is Global Forest Watch (GFW), launched in its current interactive form on 19 February 2014 after a network-phase predecessor dating to 1997.[^gfw-launch-2014] WRI owns and operates the GFW platform and is responsible for integrating datasets contributed by independent research partners: the University of Maryland GLAD Lab produces the Hansen Global Forest Change annual baseline and the GLAD-L and GLAD-S2 near-real-time alert datasets; Wageningen University and Research produces the RADD Forest Disturbance Alerts (Sentinel-1); JAXA and JICA produce JJ-FAST; MapBiomas contributes regional land-cover layers. Google Earth Engine provides cloud compute capacity as a donated platform substrate.[^gfw-integrated-alerts][^gfw-launch-2014]
WRI's technical contribution on GFW is the integration layer: GLAD-L, GLAD-S2, RADD, and DIST-ALERT (the last from UMD and NASA) are resampled to 10 m, temporally deduplicated across a 180-day window, and combined into a unified confidence-tiered alert product. Alerts confirmed by two or more independent systems carry the highest confidence classification.[^gfw-integrated-alerts]
GFW Pro, launched 11 June 2019, is WRI's enterprise subscription platform for deforestation risk management in commodity supply chains. It layers the same alert datasets over user-uploaded farm polygons and supply-chain locations, adds an EUDR compliance module (using the Natural Lands Map as the 31 December 2020 baseline), and is used by over 1,000 organisations across agriculture, finance, and compliance sectors.[^wri-launch-2019]
The Land and Carbon Lab, co-convened by WRI and the Bezos Earth Fund since 2021, extends WRI's geospatial monitoring scope to non-forest ecosystems. Its research network of more than 200 scientists across 35+ institutions produces open datasets including the Global Tree Canopy Height map, Natural Lands Map, and Tropical Tree Cover. The Natural Lands Map feeds directly into GFW Pro's EUDR module.[^lcl-about]