Climate TRACE releases first comprehensive, independent database of global greenhouse gas emissions
We are proud to announce the release of groundbreaking new data on shipping as part of the world’s first comprehensive accounting of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions based primarily on direct, independent observation from the Climate TRACE coalition. Climate TRACE’s innovative approach fills critical knowledge gaps for all countries that rely on the patchwork system of self-reporting that serves as the basis for most existing emissions inventories.
Driven by satellites, remote sensing, and advanced applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning, the inventory is particularly relevant to the more than 100 countries that lack access to comprehensive emissions data from the past five years. In practice, this means that heading into climate negotiations at COP26 in Glasgow, world leaders in every country can inform their decisions with data that reflects current emissions trends, rather than trends prior to the creation of the Paris Agreement. The most recent shipping emissions inventory is from 2018, and Climate TRACE data can help fill this critical data gap of nearly 3 years.
The inventory, which spans the years 2015–2020, reveals striking insights about recent emissions trends across 10 sectors and 38 subsectors of the global economy. OceanMind’s data reveals new insights into recent trends in the shipping sector including:
● Total shipping emissions have increased nearly 10% per year since 2018
● Increasing shipping emissions threaten to undermine achievement of Paris Agreement goals
● Cruise ships have been the most dramatically affected by COVID-19 restrictions, emissions dropped to about 25% of pre covid levels.
“For far too long, climate action has been hindered by a lack of independent, verifiable data on emissions. Climate TRACE is built on the notion that we can only manage what we can measure,” explained former U.S. vice president and Climate TRACE coalition convening member Al Gore. “We are helping to create a level playing field for everyone who wants to take an active role in reducing emissions — from government ministers and regulators, to investors and business leaders, to journalists and citizen activists. This new era of radical transparency will put everything out into the open.”
“As shipping was excluded from the 2015 Paris Agreement, there is a lack of accountability for emissions reduction. In addition, there is no recent global inventory of shipping emissions data” stated Mark Powell of OceanMind “We fill this gap by providing emissions estimates for tens of thousands of vessels around the world in near real time”
To produce these insights, the Climate TRACE coalition harnessed AI and machine learning to analyze over 59 trillion bytes of data from more than 300 satellites, more than 11,100 sensors, and numerous additional sources of emissions information from all over the world. This unprecedented effort provides a significant step forward in emissions monitoring, transforming a system that has previously all too often relied on rough estimates, opaque methods, and inaccessible reporting.
OceanMind monitor the location and movements of tens of thousands of ships on an hourly basis to generate our emissions estimates within one week of ship emissions occurring. Our focus on timely results can inform decarbonization efforts in a way that years-old data cannot.
“Big Data, artificial intelligence, and satellites are shaping people’s lives in so many ways, from shopping to smart home assistants to navigation. Now we’re all applying this technology’s potential to one of the most important issues of our time: the climate crisis,” said Gavin McCormick, executive director of coalition convening member WattTime. “We’ve established a shared, open monitoring system capable of detecting essentially all forms of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. This is a transformative step forward that puts timely information at the fingertips of all those who seek to drive significant emissions reductions on our path to net zero.”
The Climate TRACE approach also means that emissions information is more timely than ever before. Historically, because many emissions inventories largely rely on self-reported data, they have taken years to assemble, complicating efforts to know if decarbonization policies are working. Climate TRACE is built to identify emissions quickly and accurately. This first data release is already a massive improvement over the status-quo, providing timely comprehensive data through the end of 2020 and including information at the detailed industry level for subsectors that were not previously available in most countries.
The software behind Climate TRACE also means constantly improving data will become available sooner with even shorter elapsed times between when emissions occur and when they’re included in the Climate TRACE inventory. And over time, the granularity of TRACE data will improve to provide the global community with the ability to view emissions from specific power plants, airports, forests, and countless other assets all over the world, and to “see” emissions fluctuations from a single source, week-by-week.
Our shipping model will improve over time as we acquire more detailed and accurate emissions data to ground truth our model. For now, we use the best publicly available information to estimate emissions and our validation shows that we can model broad trends with good accuracy.
About Climate TRACE
Climate TRACE is a global coalition of nonprofits, tech companies, and universities created to make meaningful climate action faster and easier by independently tracking greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with unprecedented detail and speed. We harness satellite imagery and other forms of remote sensing, artificial intelligence, and data science expertise to identify human-caused GHG emissions when and where they happen. Coalition members include Blue Sky Analytics, (carbon)plan, Earthrise Alliance, Hudson Carbon, Hypervine, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, OceanMind, RMI, TransitionZero, WattTime, and climate leader and former U.S. Vice President Al Gore. For more information, please visit: https://climatetrace.org/.
