EarthTrends is pleased to announce that we are changing the way much of our site content is licensed. It has been a longstanding goal of this project, and of the World Resources Institute (WRI), to make information free and accessible to all. In fact, "Access" is one of WRI's four institute goals. To that end, we have always encouraged the replication, modification, and dissemination of the information that you find on EarthTrends. But perhaps that has not been explicit. We are now licensing all of our content under a Creative Commons license. This means that anyone is free to use, modify, and share any of our information products so long as EarthTrends is acknowledged as the source.

This license applies to our data products, such as maps and country profiles, and applies to any content on EarthTrends pages with a Creative Commons logo in the footer (such as this one). The data found in our searchable database, for which WRI does not hold a copyright, are free for anyone to use without mentioning EarthTrends -- though we always appreciate recognition.

Creative Commons offers several different types of licenses. We have opted to use what's called the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which means that anyone is free to copy, display or distribute the work and make derivative works, so long as attribution is given and it's done for non-commercial purposes. A more detailed explanation can be found here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/.

EarthTrends often supports commercial products based on our work; please contact us directly to discuss the use of EarthTrends materials in commercial endeavors. Any questions or thoughts, please let us know.