Tracking Worldwide Carbon Emissions Using Satellite Imaging & AI Computer Vision Algorithms: Tackling The Gaping Flaws In The Fight For Climate Change In 2022
Climate Change is a serious issue which the world is grappling with at the turn of the new decade, as 2021 gives way to 2022.
Countries around world have come together as per the Paris Accords signed in 2015 to monitor and reduce carbon emissions across the globe. And now nearly a decade on, the urgency to fight and combat climate change and global warming is gradually increasing along with the awareness about it.
However, believe it or not, as ridiculous as it sounds, the process of getting data from each country about their carbon emissions is by “asking polluters how much they polluted” i.e. asking companies to report their carbon emissions and hoping that the data of the numbers and figures are true.
That’s like asking a thief if he stole something and hoping he’s telling the truth. It’s surely certain that companies around the world fudge their emissions data to ensure lesser sanctions.
It doesn’t end there, some of the reporting and collection of this data is done manually, on paper! Even in 2021/22. While some countries, according to the data, haven’t had an emissions inventory done in nearly 20 years.
It’s a well known fact that climate change is a worldwide concern that is becoming even more alarming by the year, but there are so many gaping flaws in the process of reporting data and in fighting it that the Paris Agreement really seems superficial & only academically relevant.
These revelations are startling considering the era we’re in and the technology available to us.
That’s why in 2021, a coalition of scientists, activists, and tech companies around the world are working together to address this issue.
We know what is causing climate change: burning fossil fuels from human activities.
But, which human activities? Who specifically is burning all of these fossil fuels, and for what and where and how?
As climate activist Gavin McCormick explains,
“There are countries that haven’t had an emissions inventory in 20 years. What are you actually supposed to do with information that old? We need to not just be looking at what are the emissions of entire countries, because if you want to know how to reduce them, you need to know: Do I need to go after cars or factories? What in my country is driving all these emissions? We can’t keep relying on asking polluters to report how much they polluted.
“If we want to get really serious about fighting climate change, we need better tools. We need to have some way to get information in ideally real-time, not years later; that doesn’t rely on just asking the polluters; that has really detailed information about where those emissions came from, not just country level; that is open and transparent, so everybody knows they can trust it; and ideally, that’s free, because we can’t just have a situation where only those who can afford to pay know how much is being emitted.”
The Solution
To address this issue, a team of several NGOs across the globe including McCormick’s company WattTime and other tech companies in the sector are working together to use satellite imaging to create complex AI computer vision algorithms to look at and scan hundreds of thousands of satellite captured images and identify the amount of carbon emissions from power plants, factories, factory farms, oil & gas companies and get data every few days.
And it doesn’t just stop at only power plants and factories, the coalition is working together to make complex and intricate AI computer vision algorithms to monitor every kind of carbon emission on the planet across the world including those from the ships and cars.
As McCormick elaborates,
My organization, WattTime, and a number of other small NGOs have teamed up to build an artificial intelligence algorithm that can scan visual imagery like this every few days and look, without asking the polluters, to see how much they are polluting for every power plant in the world. It’s pretty exciting.
The reason we can do this is that there are so many free and public satellite images available now from sources like NASA’s Landsat 8 or China’s Gaofen 6. It’s possible actually to get photos every few days of every major power plant in the entire world.
A really exciting example of this is Transition Zero. So they’re a UK-based organization that is able to monitor the emissions of steel mills, and they can do that even when those emissions are invisible to the naked eye. Because one of the really important, interesting things about artificial intelligence is with different forms of signals from satellites, we can look at very specific chemical processes in different parts of the supply chain. You also have the ability to measure factory farms.
Did you know even the United States EPA in charge of regulating them does not have a complete inventory of how many highly polluting factory farms are in the United States?
But a start-up named Synthetic has been able to apply computer vision to build an inventory of them and is now scaling it up to expose every factory farm worldwide. RMI is monitoring oil and gas emissions from production and refining. Blue Sky Analytics, based in India, is monitoring crop fires and forest fires. You want to talk about car transportation? Johns Hopkins University is modeling all the ground transportation and looking at the road networks worldwide.
There’s Ocean Mine’s model of (monitoring) every single ship on the planet and the associated emissions.
Climate TRACE
All this collated emissions data once identified by the AI algorithms run by their respective individual companies across the globe & the NGOs working with them, is being collected, collated and being made viewable to anyone and everyone around the globe and shareable & analyzable on a sort of Wikipedia like free database called “Climate TRACE”.
As McCormick explains:
“Each one of our organizations has learned to specialize in one or two forms of particular emissions. But we’re sharing them all in a giant database known as Climate TRACE. One of the interesting things about Climate TRACE is that it’s fundamentally built on global techniques.
“This is really powerful because it used to be the case that only rich countries can afford to look at their emissions in great detail. We are talking about properly global systems that are available and free for everyone.”
“We have software engineers volunteering their time on nights and weekends to make the data engineering work. We have academics validating algorithms. We have NGOs running different models. We have sensor and satellite data companies donating code. And much like Wikipedia, what’s going on is all of these many, many different experts are sharing our resources in a single common pot that anyone can see, everything has to be cross-validated, and it’s available to the public. The biggest difference from Wikipedia is there’s a lot more real-time sensors involved.”
The Implications Of TRACE, Countries Working Together & The Way Forward
The stark contrast as compared to the past is that countries are surprisingly co-operative and willing to trust each each other to work together in combating climate change using these AI-powered solutions.
Nevertheless, the data that TRACE and the AI-satellite-tech has revealed so far has shown that a lot of industries in different countries have falsified their reporting and many countries have ‘got away with murder’.
However, despite the misgivings of past, the future seems rather promising and exciting with countries establishing trust and coming together to combat this issue collectively with this now publicly available data like Climate TRACE and the tech companies and NGOs pushing boundaries to make it even more accurate.
As McCormick reflects on his work,
“So why are we doing this? In a word, transparency. We were approached early in the project by a former climate negotiator who told us that the heart of the Paris Agreement is supposed to be that countries are able to see what everybody else is doing. They can learn to trust each other, and that’s why they’re willing to hold hands and leap together. But the problem is, there’s a lot of self-reporting going on, and a lot of countries don’t have the resources to do this very expensive old form of monitoring. And so what we’ve tried to prioritize for Climate TRACE version one is releasing before COP26, last month, September 21(2021), a version of Climate TRACE that is free and available to everybody, that has the emissions for every country, every sector and every year on the planet.”
“Now it is imperfect. Artificial intelligence starts out not quite as good, and it gets better over time. So far, one of the things we’ve been able to measure is: What does this compare to what countries have been reporting? So we can’t say that our methods are completely perfect yet, but one of the big questions we get is: Should countries trust each other? And one of the most surprising things I think I’ve learned from this project is that I think the answer is yes.”
“I mean, we’ve definitely found some missing emissions. There’s a few industries that we need to go have some hard conversations with. But by and large, what we’ve been really struck by is the vast majority of countries appear to have been able to get away with murder, but negotiating with each other in complete good faith. If you’re a climate negotiator heading to COP26, I would like to just pause and appreciate what that implies for trust in what’s about to happen.”
“But I think it’d be a waste of AI if we stopped there. So our next step for Climate TRACE version two, what we’re working on, is making every single emitting asset in the world visible. So it’s going to look like this. And what that’s going to mean is not just national totals, but giving tools. I’ve spoken with governments that are interested in knowing: Where in our economies are the emissions coming from? I’ve spoken with companies who’d like to green their supply chains, but they have to know which factories are cleaner than which other factories. I’ve spoken with asset managers who are investing 43 trillion dollars in net-zero, but to actually achieve their goals, they need a way to manage and measure: Are those emissions reductions really happening?
“So I think it’s pretty exciting that we can now ensure that if anybody in the world is trying to hide emissions, they can just forget about it. Those days are over.”
“But the part that really excites me the most is giving tools to others in the climate fight to get the job done faster.”
In his 10 minute TED Talk, Gavin McCormick explains how he’s leading the coalition of tackling finding emissions data in real-time using AI-powered satellite imaging tech and also reflecting on the past and the necessity of creating TRACE and making it publicly available to everybody and anybody in the now intensified fight for climate change, so that we can, as a collective, fight this pertinent issue on a global level.
