Earth Genome builds the Climate TRACE experience for the most comprehensive and granular greenhouse gas emission dataset ever created

At COP28, Climate TRACE has released the most comprehensive and granular dataset of recent greenhouse gas emissions ever created. Earth Genome is proud to be a member of the coalition that created this data, developing and designing the innovative experience to match that scale of information live now at https://climatetrace.org/.

No one can explain why this matters better than former US Vice President and Climate TRACE co-founder Al Gore. From the launch, he said

108 nations have submitted NO inventories of emissions for any of the past five years. NO nations have submitted an emissions inventory for 2022 yet. Climate TRACE is sharing all of that data starting today.

It is a startling state of affairs that global decision makers typically work with such little detail of emissions, and that must change. Al Gore often quotes the adage “You can’t manage what you don’t measure”. Through satellite imagery and machine learning, Climate TRACE makes facility level source data available in every country, no matter what that nation is reporting.

The data goes beyond location and emissions volume to include critical actionable pieces of information like ownership details and operational efficiency. And the data is open, for use by countries, civil society, industry, journalists, and everyone with a stake in reducing emissions (in other words, all of us). Climate TRACE data has already enabled Tesla, GM, Polestar and Boeing and other manufacturers to make better informed and more timely choices to select suppliers that emit less.

The site experience is designed to find and enable reuse of relevant data, fast. The search queries across locations, owners, and the names of specific facilities, and those filters can be combined in various ways. The results are easily shared. For instance, these are all facilities in Climate TRACE owned by Chevron in California. Another way to find data is by exploring the map and selecting an individual county (or equivalent), to get a summary of all sources in that area; for example, suburban Mumbai, India. That level of geographic specificity will assist governments worldwide to hold companies to account on all emissions in their supply chain.

Organizing this much data in a single map experience meant striking a lot of balances. Emissions data is sourced from data organized as points like factories, areas like road transportation, and gridded data such as rice fields. We made careful choices of colors to represent a large number of sectors without overwhelming the map, adjusted sizes for quick relative understanding of emissions, and leveraged the latest in client side rendering to visualize large raster files with ease.

The data for any set of filters, or an individual emissions source, are directly downloadable from the map. Data is available as bulk downloads segmented by sector or country. And for programmatic access, we’ve made a beta public API available. There are many ways to use this emissions data no one has imagined yet.

Climate TRACE is just getting started. We are now excited to see the rapid impact of this data. Vilas Dhar Vilas Dhar, President of the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation and a member of the U.N. AI advisory board laid out the potential for Climate TRACE in these terms.

If you’re a business, and you want to ensure that your supply chain is carbon neutral, you now have an independent verification system that uses AI to let you understand your carbon footprint. If you’re a government that wants to make sure you’re hitting your targets, you now have the ability to go and make that the case.

Climate TRACE is the result of a remarkable team effort. The coalition brings together a dozen different organizations, each taking on distinct responsibilities, running together at the pace of a tech startup. Many coalitions end up as talking shops and are unable to turn that into action. While there are robust debates, there’s clear alignment of direction across everyone involved, and we are able to build together as a team. This is a promising base for what comes next.

The team to address climate is everyone. Learn more about the importance and impact of Climate TRACE at The Guardian and Fortune. And the whole launch event from COP28 with Vice President Gore and Climate TRACE co-founder Gavin McCormick is worth watching. Explore, build, and act! Tell us what you’re discovering in Climate TRACE and what you can do with the data.