As the premier independent institute dedicated exclusively to analyzing environmental, energy, and natural resource topics, RFF gathers under one roof a unique community of scholars conducting impartial research to enable policymakers to make sound choices.

Since 1952, RFF scholars have been asking—and answering—tough questions, looking over the intellectual horizon, and providing successive generations of policy, business, environmental, and civic leaders with the core tools and fundamental approaches they need to improve environmental policymaking worldwide.

Through a half-century of scholarship, RFF has built a reputation for reasoned analysis of important problems and for developing innovative solutions to environmental challenges. RFF pioneered the research methods that allow for critical analysis of environmental and natural resource policies, enabling researchers to evaluate their true social costs and benefits.

At RFF headquarters in Washington, DC, scrupulous academic research intersects with acute policy relevance. And it is at this juncture that RFF makes its unique contribution. Inventing new tools for social science research and developing the intellectual underpinnings of entirely new analytic approaches are at the core of RFF’s independent, objective work.

All too often, advocates present facts selectively, scholars speak in impenetrable jargon, and political leaders act without adequately understanding the consequences of their decisions. By virtue of our mission to improve public policy through social science research, RFF is committed to disseminating findings in the clearest voice, to the broadest audience.

RFF researchers publish consistently in the most respected peer-reviewed journals and are valued by academic colleagues around the world for their scholarly contributions and analysis. As an organization dedicated to both fundamental research studies as well as highly applied analysis, RFF is honored to have a Nobel Laureate serving on its Board of Directors.

Through briefings, seminars, conferences, congressional testimony, print publications, and audio and video streaming on our web site, research findings and analytic insights are widely circulated to journalists and policymakers as well as environmental advocates and business leaders.

RFF’s Staff of over 100 people in the Washington headquarters is supplemented by 20 University Fellows, 4 academic Fellowship and Internship programs that have supported numerous scholars and students, and a network of scholars and practitioners that span the globe from Uganda and China to Mexico and Russia.

As it did over 50 years ago, RFF continues today to build both core research tools in economics and other disciplines–-the building blocks of intellectual inquiry--and to provide explicit analysis of the environmental and economic implications of policy choices.