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Right from the time of its publication in 1986, this text became and has since remained as one of the central texts in global environmental politics. It is also noted as the report that provided the momentum for the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. Crucially, the report identified inequality as the greatest cause of environmental problems and called on the world's political leaders to work out a system of redistributing resources to the developing countries of the South as a means of achieving global environmental sustainability. The World Resource Institute was established in 1982 in Washington, DC, USA, to act as a think-tank on environmental and development issues. The institute was founded by a prominent environmentalist, Lester Brown, in 1974 and focuses on the analysis of trends in major global issues in the area of environment and development.