The world has entered an era of “radical transparency for emissions tracking” thanks to a new tool that offers the most detailed, independent look at global greenhouse gas pollution to date.
Launched on Wednesday at the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt, the tracker seeks to hold big and small polluters accountable by detecting and logging emission sources in real time.
It's the brainchild of Climate TRACE – a non-profit coalition of artificial intelligence (AI) experts, data scientists, researchers and NGOs – who describe it as a comprehensive inventory of emissions spanning 20 sectors.
Included is oil and gas production and refining, the production of steel, cement and aluminium, shipping, aviation, mining, waste, agriculture, road transportation and the power sector.
Pinpointing polluters
Coalition co-founder Al Gore – a former US vice president – said that, until now, there's been a limited understanding of precisely where emissions were coming from, making the climate crisis feel like an “intractable challenge”.
AI and satellite data, the team says, has revealed that a large share of carbon pollution comes from a small number of facilities.
By pinpointing specific power plants, steel mills, urban road networks and oil and gas fields, the tracker will help climate negotiators work out the most efficient emissions-reduction policies in individual countries.
For example, the tracker has shown that one steel mill in Korea is emitting more greenhouse gas pollution in a year than the entire country of Bosnia.
Global gamechanger
Published Wednesday on Climate TRACE’s website, the tracker is free for anyone to access and includes emissions data for 72,612 individual sources.
"The release of this massive dataset represents the combined efforts of more than 100 contributing organisations worldwide,” said Gavin McCormick, co-founder and executive director of Climate TRACE.
“I’ve been thrilled to hear from climate negotiators, corporate sustainability teams, investors looking to decarbonise, climate scientists and even activists that this information is already a gamechanger that can help them make better decisions and decarbonise faster."
