As world leaders descend on New York for the UN climate action summit – and millions of activists prepare for a global climate strike later this week – the Guardian is joining forces with hundreds of newsrooms around the world to strengthen media coverage of the climate crisis.

The Guardian is the lead partner in Covering Climate Now, an initiative founded earlier this year with Columbia Journalism Review and the Nation to address the urgent need for stronger climate coverage. More than 250 newsrooms representing 32 countries – with a combined monthly reach of more than a billion people – have signed on.

This week, ahead of the UN climate summit on 23 September, the Covering Climate Now partners have pledged to increase the volume and visibility of their climate coverage in the first large-scale collaboration of the partnership. The Guardian is making a selection of its climate coverage available to partners for free to help publications without dedicated environment desks serve their audiences.

The Covering Climate Now network represents every corner of the media including TV networks (CBS News, Al Jazeera), newspapers (El País, the Toronto Star), digital players (BuzzFeed, HuffPost, Vox), wire services (Getty Images, Bloomberg), magazines (Nature, Scientific American), and dozens of podcasts, local publishers, radio and TV stations. Countries represented include Togo, Nepal, Argentina, India, Japan, Australia, Brazil, the Netherlands and dozens more.

The Guardian has long made climate coverage a top news priority, keeping the story on its front page daily. Earlier this year, the Guardian updated its style guide to introduce new terms that more accurately describe the environmental crises facing the world. The Guardian now favors the terms “climate crisis” and “climate emergency” over “climate change”.

“We want to ensure that we are being scientifically precise, while also communicating clearly with readers on this very important issue,” said the editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner. “The phrase ‘climate change’, for example, sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

The Guardian also began putting global CO 2 levels in the daily weather forecast in its print publication earlier this year.

At the launch of the Covering Climate Now partnership in May, co-founders Mark Hertsgaard of the Nation and Kyle Pope, editor-in-chief of Columbia Journalism Review, wrote an impassioned op-ed calling for change in how the media covers the climate crisis.

“At a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media,” Hertsgaard and Pope wrote. “Especially on television, where most Americans still get their news, the brutal demands of ratings and money work against adequate coverage of the biggest story of our time.”

While the project began in America, it has quickly gained traction globally and now includes dozens of international news organizations and coverage in multiple languages. If you represent a newsroom interested in joining the initiative, email coveringclimatenow@cjr.org.