An unprecedented alliance of news publishers including the Guardian, El País, Le Monde and China Daily have agreed to share climate change content to raise awareness in the runup to the next UN summit.
More than two dozen publishers from around the world – from the Sydney Morning Herald to India Today and the Seattle Times – have agreed to scrap licensing fees for climate change content so that members of the alliance can freely republish articles.
The initiative, called the Climate Publishers Network, aims to create a global pool of content to provide a resource for publishers to widen coverage ahead of the UN climate change summit in Paris in December.
The goal is to expand the network beyond its founding partners, brought together with help from the Global Editors Network, until the initiative disbands on the last day of the COP 21 summit on 11 December.
Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, El Pais editor-in-chief Antonio Cano and Global Editors Network president Ricardo Kirschbaum said: “We very much hope that publications across the political spectrum will join us either in using some of our material or, ideally, offering their own material as well.”
Publishers that are members of the network can cherry-pick the articles they want and, if necessary, can have them translated for use on their own websites.
Guardian director of digital strategy Wolfgang Blau said that the 25 founding partners represented an unprecedented mix of political leanings and geographical spread to have pulled together for such a content-sharing initiative.
“It is unprecedented that such a diverse and large group of news organisations from all continents decides to collaborate in this way,” he said. “Climate change is the biggest challenge humanity is currently facing and requires new ways of collaborating across geographic as well as political boundaries.”