Our mission is to build a fairer, more sustainable world, using evidence, action and influence in partnership with others

Working primarily in the global South, we have been applying original thinking to sustainable development issues – linking local priorities to global challenges – for more than half a century.

Our founder, Barbara Ward (pictured), was one of the first people to articulate the concept of sustainable development.

And in 1972, IIED brought the priorities of the global South to the world stage at the landmark UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, showing environmental protection and human poverty reduction are inextricably linked.

Later in the 1970s IIED turned European energy policy on its head by demonstrating that economic growth can be decoupled from rising energy consumption – mainly through smart conservation and technological improvements.

The publication of ‘A Low-Energy Strategy for the United Kingdom’ proved for the first time that modern industrial economies could continue expanding without increasing primary energy consumption.

In 1978, our 'Banking on the Biosphere' work sparked a global shift in international development assistance, prompting major aid agencies and development banks to embed environmental safeguards into their lending programmes.

Just over a decade later, in 1989, we helped to pave the way for the concept of a green economy by publishing ‘Blueprint for a Green Economy’.

As a member of the Green Economy Coalition, we’re still working to accelerate the transition to green and fair economies.

IIED provided the core research and framing for 1987’s Brundtland Report, for the World Commission on Environment and Development, embedding sustainable development into mainstream global governance.

Two years later IIED launched ‘Environment & Urbanization’, which continues to this day as one of the world's most cited academic journals dedicated to urban poverty and Southern researchers.

We transformed global conservation policy in 1994 by demonstrating that protecting biodiversity requires securing the land rights, livelihoods and active leadership of local communities.

‘Whose Eden?’ was a landmark report that challenged top-down, exclusionary "fortress conservation" models in Africa.

The 1990s also saw IIED democratise development planning by scaling participatory appraisal techniques across more than 120 countries, putting research tools directly into the hands of local communities.

With the global Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development (MMSD) project and the Sustainable Paper Cycle assessment around the turn of the century, we pioneered multi-stakeholder industry reviews that created foundational corporate social responsibility and sustainability benchmarks for global mining and forest supply chains.

Today, IIED applies those same principles to the global rush for the critical minerals needed for green energy, artificial intelligence and defence systems.

At the start of the century IIED encouraged the formation of the Least Developed Countries Group of the UNFCCC.

Since 2001 we have helped establish and build the negotiating capacity of the group and its negotiators, enabling climate-vulnerable nations to drive key global outcomes such as the 1.5°C target in 2015’s Paris Agreement.

Since 2018 we have been leading global efforts to change traditional top-down climate funding models and ensure decisions are made by the local communities and institutions who need it the most.

The Least Developed Countries Initiative for Effective Adaptation and Resilience was followed by the principles for locally led adaptation.

In parallel, IIED pioneered debt-for-climate swaps to tackle nature loss and sovereign debt simultaneously.

We marked our 50^th birthday in 2022/23 by reflecting on some of our biggest achievements – and looked forward to how we will continue to make a difference on the global stage.

Ahead of the Stockholm+50 conference we published research exploring the evolution of sustainable development since the early 1970s, highlighting our role in 10 key movements for change.

This was followed by our ‘Manifesto for a thriving world’ in 2024, setting out six key priorities as we tackle the climate, nature and inequality crises.