A consortium of dozens of nonprofit research organizations launched a free online platform on Wednesday detailing greenhouse gas emissions worldwide across 20 economic sectors. Viewable in a web browser, Climate Trace includes a zoomed world map that shows and ranks the 72,000 dirty power plants, oil refineries, airports, ships and more. The group used satellite imagery and machine learning as well as more conventional techniques to build what it says is the largest available source of greenhouse gas emissions data.
“The sources of emissions data that are available now are not granular enough, nor comprehensive enough, to use as a basis for making decisions,” said the former US vice president. Al Gore he said in an interview. “And so what we’re finding is that there’s a huge appetite for accurate data.” Gore, who has raised funds for the group, is expected to present the platform on Wednesday at COP27, the UN climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.
Each economic sector of the platform is tracked using its own methodology, managed by team leaders and verified by other experts not involved in the creation of the technique. Several of these individual methodologies have already been peer-reviewed, and the team hopes to devote more and more of their work to this rigorous process.
“I like to think of it as a Wikipedia with more sensors,” he said Gavin McCormickexecutive director of research non-profit WattTime and co-founder of Climate Trace.
The site allows users to compare any major source of pollution in the world, regardless of scale, against any other. For example: According to the site’s data, China’s five largest power plants release more carbon dioxide in a year than the entire country of Colombia.
The goal of the project is to provide decision-makers with information to determine where to reduce carbon dioxide, the most common greenhouse gas, and other pollutants. But takeaways aren’t always intuitive. Saudi Arabia’s oil production, for example, is responsible for less CO₂ per barrel than the equivalent of Canada or Venezuela. In a world that still needs oil, some “might prefer to see a world where people increase oil production from Saudi Arabia and reduce oil production elsewhere,” McCormick said. “So it’s a good example of how data cuts both ways.”
Climate Trace itself is made up of hundreds of researchers who have been scouring the globe for three years, using 300 satellites and 11,100 sensors, as well as corporate and government data and the Internet at large, to assemble such a comprehensive view of the human being sources of greenhouse gas pollution as they believe is currently possible.
The data they collected suggests that emissions from the oil and gas sector are much higher than some countries or facilities are reporting. Recent scientific research on methane flaring and leakage is built into one of the platform’s models, leading to the conclusion that many facilities are dramatically under-reporting their emissions. According to Climate Trace, countries that disclose to the UN their emissions related to oil and gas production may have actual emissions of up to three times that amount.
“We know that transparency drives accountability,” he said Andrew Zolli, director of impact at satellite company Planet Labs, partner of Climate Trace. “We’re headed for an era of radical climate transparency.”
Their findings also show that in virtually every corner of the global economy, a small number of pollutants make up the bulk of emissions. It’s true on a larger scale: the 500 largest emitters account for less than 1% of all in the group’s database, but were responsible for 14% of total emissions in 2021. Oil and gas production it accounts for 26 of the 50 dirtiest sources. Sixty percent of the 500 dirtiest sources are power plants.
“We’re finding these patterns everywhere,” McCormick said. “Across the board, across all sectors, a relatively small number of assets account for a much larger proportion of total global emissions than we expected.”
With the world’s diplomats and climate advocates in Sharm El-Sheik for COP27, the ability to independently verify any country’s emissions estimates, or provide them where they are not, may be the most potential use important from Climate Trace this week and next.
But there are possibly many others. The map tool allows users to zoom into any territory to see where specific facilities are located in relation to surrounding cities or natural areas. A scroll at the bottom of the screen adjusts to show the largest contaminants at each zoom level.
Corporate supply chain managers can use the platform to assess the carbon footprints of potential partners. International energy developers could scan a country or continent for places where fossil fuel generators predominate and clean energy can make big CO₂ gains in a short period of time. Cities bound to measure their CO₂ liability could use the tool to get an idea of how they’re doing, or to check their own math.
The goal of Climate Trace is to spur collaboration, not finger-pointing or “naming and shaming,” said Deborah Gordon, senior director of climate intelligence at RMI, an energy think tank and labor leader from Climate Trace on oil and gas production. .
“Climate Trace does not exist to be the climate police,” he said.
The project’s origins date back to 2018, when Carbon Tracker, a UK research non-profit, published a pilot study applying machine learning to satellite images of coal plants in countries where there is often little information about them. The researchers studied images of plumes released from chimneys and cooling towers and relied on their ability to infer from this how much plants were being used, their productivity and even their profitability.
McCormick and Matt Grey, who led the Carbon Tracker study and is now CEO of British company Transition Zero, applied for and received funding from Google.org’s Google AI Impact Challenge to expand the work, also partnering with the World Resources Institute. In May 2019, they announced their goal to track the pollution of all the world’s power plants in real time. Gore read an article about it, contacted them to see how many other sectors could be included, and Climate Trace was born.
The project grew as it became apparent how much data it could absorb. The scientists contributed data that had never left their own servers for little reason other than data incompatibility. About 50 software engineers work directly on Climate Trace, in some cases just to make existing data usable.
In addition to coordinator, Gore worked as a fundraiser for the group, securing support from Google.org, Schmidt Futures, the Benificus Foundation and its partners at Generation Investment Management. Fossil fuel backers were ruled out as a matter of principle, and the team also avoided corporations, to prevent them from using any support from the effort to wash themselves, Gore said.
In September 2021 Climate Trace published national greenhouse gas inventories covering the year 2020, which until today was the group’s main output.
The group got some tough love in a “fast-track” National Academy of Sciences report released in early October that assessed ways to improve control of greenhouse gases. The report focused the company on several areas, including data transparency, peer review of the entire project, and the inclusion of air pollution agencies or citizen science efforts.
McCormick said the panel was evaluating older work, adding that as Climate Trace grows rapidly, its data doubles every two months or so, it adopts recommendations and addresses criticism. The group is releasing more than 400 pages of additional material, according to McCormick; it has been reviewed by multiple independent sources and has sought input from a wide range of government officials and practitioners in developing countries, he said.
“Our commitment is to openly and transparently publish the best information we have at any given time, and to be constantly soliciting and incorporating widespread feedback from many sources as we go,” McCormick said. “And I think that’s how peer review needs to be in the future.”
Gore said the urgency of climate change sometimes encourages research to be published first and peer-reviewed later.
“The hunger for this data is such that people don’t want to wait years before they start using data … that can empower them to make important decisions,” he said. “We have a global emergency on our hands, and we have very accurate data that can be used to respond to that emergency.”
