Climate TRACE Tracks Emissions From 745 Million Sources the Polluters Never Reported

For most of the history of climate diplomacy, the world has run on trust. Countries report their own greenhouse gas emissions, on their own schedules, using their own methods. Developed countries submit annual inventories to the UN climate body more than a year after the fact. Developing countries report only every two years. Some large emitters have not submitted an inventory at all this decade. Climate TRACE exists because that system leaves an enormous blind spot, and because satellites and machine learning can now fill it.

Climate TRACE, short for Tracking Real-Time Atmospheric Carbon Emissions, is a nonprofit coalition that formed in July 2020 and launched publicly ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow in 2021. It was convened with the involvement of former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and built by a coalition of research groups, nonprofits, and technology companies. Its mission is radical in its simplicity: measure emissions from every significant source on Earth, independently, and publish the results for anyone to see.

A Census of Pollution

The scale of what Climate TRACE has built is hard to picture. Its database now tracks emissions from more than 745 million greenhouse gas emitting assets worldwide. Its 2024 facility level inventory alone covered over 660 million individual facilities and sources, spanning power plants, coal mines, oil and gas fields, steel mills, cement kilns, ships, and roads. It is the largest global inventory of emission sources ever assembled, and it is presented as an interactive map anyone can explore.

The coalition does not own satellites. Instead, its algorithms ingest imagery and data from existing Earth observation satellites and merge it with publicly available information such as government data sets and OpenStreetMap. For power plants, software is trained with supervised learning to combine satellite imagery with these other open sources, inferring activity at each facility and converting it into estimated emissions. Where a country's official statistics are years old, Climate TRACE publishes fresh numbers monthly, roughly two months after the emissions occur.

Why Independent Measurement Matters

Emissions numbers are not an accounting curiosity. They determine who is complying with pledges, where climate finance should flow, and whether the promises made at COP summits each year are being kept. When the only available data comes from the emitters themselves, disputes over monitoring, reporting, and verification can stall negotiations for years.

Climate TRACE changes the negotiating position of anyone with access to a web browser. A small island state facing rising seas can now cite independent, asset level data about the facilities driving the problem. Investigators and journalists can compare what a company reports against what its plants appear to be emitting. Researchers have noted that the tool could reduce these verification disputes and thereby enable more ambitious climate pledges. Time magazine named Climate TRACE one of the hundred best inventions of 2020.

From Measuring Problems to Finding Solutions

In November 2025, at the COP30 summit in Belem, Brazil, Climate TRACE took its most significant step beyond measurement. It released a new tool that pairs every asset in its database of more than 745 million sources with at least one potential option for reducing emissions. The system works by identifying proven, cost-effective strategies already used successfully at facilities around the world, then using the similarity between assets to locate other sites where the same strategies could be replicated. The suggested solutions range from renewable energy and electric vehicles to industrial heat pumps and balanced fertilizer use.

The motivation is stark. According to figures Climate TRACE cites from the International Energy Agency, only 17 percent of clean energy investment went to developing nations other than China in the prior year. The IPCC has found that roughly 90 percent of climate finance stays within the country where it originates, a pattern it calls home bias, caused in part by a lack of information about opportunities elsewhere. Climate TRACE's own data show that deploying climate solutions in developing countries would cut three times more emissions than deploying them in developed ones.

The tool also assigns each option a difficulty score, combining how effectively emissions can be reduced at that particular asset with an estimate of how easily the fix can be implemented given local conditions such as the power grid mix and transportation networks. A city planner, a plant manager, and an investment fund can all query the same database at the scale that matters to them.

The Limits of Seeing Everything

Climate TRACE is careful about what it does not claim. Its estimates are models, not measurements from smokestacks, and they carry uncertainty, particularly for smaller and dispersed sources. The solutions tool does not capture every viable decarbonization option, and the coalition says it will keep adding strategies over time. The database does not yet reflect every sector with perfect granularity.

But the direction of travel is unmistakable. For the first time, there exists a public, continuously updated, independently built picture of where greenhouse gases actually come from, asset by asset, almost everywhere on Earth. As Al Gore put it when the solutions tool launched, the world already has the cost-effective solutions it needs to begin solving the climate crisis. What it has lacked is knowing exactly where to deploy them for maximum impact. A database of 745 million sources, built from satellites and machine learning and given away for free, is the map that closes that gap.