Climate TRACE

Climate TRACE (Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions) is an independent nonprofit coalition that monitors and publishes greenhouse gas emissions from individual assets worldwide using satellite data, remote sensing, and artificial intelligence. Formed on July 1, 2020 and publicly launched in 2021 ahead of COP26, it counts former U.S. Vice President Al Gore among its co-founders.^[2][3].

The coalition publishes an open emissions inventory covering more than 740 million assets, aggregated from millions of individual emissions sources across 10 industrial sectors and 67 sub-sectors, with monthly updates.^[1] Its emissions map has been described as the largest global inventory of greenhouse gas emission sources, and *Time* magazine named it one of the hundred best inventions of 2020.^[2]

What It Does

Climate TRACE tracks human-caused greenhouse gas emissions at the level of individual assets, such as power plants, coal mines, oil and gas infrastructure, steel mills, and ships. Users can examine more than 744 million emitting assets individually or aggregated by city, state, or country.^[1]

Beyond carbon dioxide and methane, the platform also covers non-greenhouse air pollutants, and it models estimated emissions reductions from specific candidate climate actions for every source in its inventory.^[1]

Data And Methodology

The organization does not operate its own satellites. Instead, it trains machine-learning models, including supervised learning approaches, to combine satellite imagery and other remote sensing techniques with open data such as government datasets, OpenStreetMap, and corporate reports to estimate emissions for facilities without direct monitoring.^[2]

Emissions are organized into 10 industrial sectors broken into 67 sub-sectors, covering three greenhouse gases and eight non-GHG air pollutants. The dataset spans roughly ten years, from 2015 onward, with monthly data available from 2021.^[1]

Products

The core product is a free public emissions explorer and interactive map at climatetrace.org, which summarizes over 2.7 million distinct emissions sources drawn from hundreds of millions of assets.^[1]

Data releases occur monthly, with new figures published about two months after the emissions being measured.^[2]

Delivery And Pricing

All data is published openly and free of charge by a coalition that describes itself as comprising more than 100 universities, scientists, and AI experts.^[1] There is no commercial subscription tier; the project instead solicits contributions of data, funding, and volunteer expertise through its website.^[1]

History

The coalition was formed on July 1, 2020 and launched publicly in 2021 before COP26, with the stated aim of improving monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) of both carbon dioxide and methane emissions. As of 2023, members included nonprofits such as CarbonPlan, Earthrise Alliance, Global Energy Monitor, Hudson Carbon, OceanMind, Rocky Mountain Institute, TransitionZero, and WattTime, along with companies Blue Sky Analytics and Hypervine, and Al Gore in a personal capacity.^[2]

Landscape

Climate TRACE occupies the free-open end of the emissions-data landscape, complementing satellite methane trackers and commercial carbon-intelligence vendors. Because official UNFCCC inventories from developed countries are submitted with more than a year's lag, and some large emitters report infrequently or not at all, the coalition positions its asset-level near-real-time estimates as an independent cross-check on self-reported national and corporate figures.^[2]