Indpendent Greenhouse gas
Emissions Tracking
Loading data from 1,813,558 emissions sources summarized from 662,637,077 assets.
About the Coalition

Did you know?

Climate TRACE is a non-profit coalition of organizations building a timely, open, and accessible inventory of exactly where greenhouse gas emissions are coming from.

Our goal

We make meaningful climate action faster and easier by harnessing technology to track greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions with unprecedented detail and speed, delivering information that is relevant to all parties working to achieve net-zero global emissions.

Our Purpose

For decades, measurements such as the Keeling Curve have given us the big-picture view of how much carbon dioxide is in the Earth’s atmosphere. We know emissions are on the rise, and we know it’s a result of our continued use of fossil fuels.

But we need additional information about exactly where and when greenhouse gas emissions are occurring in order to set actionable goals to reduce them and to track our progress toward these emissions reduction goals. Climate TRACE was formed in order to provide this insight on a comprehensive basis across all countries, major emitting industries, and major individual sources of emissions, enabling a new era of radical transparency that will help facilitate concrete climate action.

Until now, most emissions inventories have been based on self-reported, often years-late data that often had to rely on rough estimates, opaque methods, and inaccessible reporting. Government officials, scientists, investors, executives, and activists need better data to support the creation of policies, programs, and campaigns aimed at limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C as agreed to under the Paris Climate Agreement.

That’s where Climate TRACE comes in. We’re harnessing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to analyze over 90 trillion bytes of data from more than 300 satellites, more than 11,000 sensors, and numerous additional sources of emissions information from all over the world. The result is a groundbreaking approach to emissions monitoring… one that is independent, transparent, and timely.

The journey began in 2019 when two of our founding coalition members, WattTime and TransitionZero, teamed up to receive a Google.org grant to monitor emissions from power plants from space using satellites. At the urging of former US Vice President Al Gore, the project opened conversations with many researchers and advocates around the world, who started asking: if even more of us joined together, how far could this approach go? With enough collaboration and data sharing, could we together extend such techniques to collectively monitor nearly all human-caused greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions globally?

The project was so ambitious we initially viewed it as a high-risk, high-reward moonshot. But to our surprise and delight, over time it has become clear that the answer is yes, it can be done. And so Climate TRACE launched in July 2020 and has now gathered over 100 collaborating nonprofits, tech companies, universities, researchers, and climate expert.

Climate TRACE’s global emissions inventory, released in September 2021, provided the first comprehensive accounting of GHG emissions based primarily on direct, independent observation. In November 2022, the coalition began monitoring the largest 500 emitting assets in each emitting sector worldwide. In December 2023, we released a nearly comprehensive global analysis of over 350 million emitting assets worldwide.

Together, we’re making GHG emissions visible. Are you interested in helping to trace the roots of the climate crisis, and use those data to help reduce emissions faster and more accurately? If so, join us! Only by working together will we we able to solve the climate crisis in time.

Our Roadmap

Our work builds upon recent advances in satellite observation and artificial intelligence that are enabling breakthroughs in emissions monitoring across sectors. Our work is based on cooperation and collaboration and we aim to work with and learn from researchers and technologists around the globe.

That means Climate TRACE is constantly evolving and improving. We aim to harness the latest improvements in technologies and methodologies to provide the most accurate picture of global emissions possible.

May 2019
Three nonprofits receive funding from Google.org to use AI to monitor power plant emissions from space.
January 2020
The vision expands to cover all global emissions; additional partners identified.
July 2020
The Climate TRACE coalition launches and work begins.
December 2020
Climate TRACE co-hosts Remote Sensing Technology Forum with UN Race to Zero and adds new partners and collaborators.
June 2021
Launch data validation effort by external scientists and emissions experts.
September 2021
Release of first Climate TRACE emissions inventory.
October 2021
Coalition member Gavin McCormick gives a TED Talk on Climate TRACE.
March 2020
Climate TRACE and The Climate Group launch the “States and Regions Remote Sensing” (STARRS) project to deliver emissions inventories for sub-national governments.
July 2022
Climate TRACE adds granularity to its emissions inventory, with data on emissions by individual greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide) and the ability to compare emissions potential over 20 or 100 years.
November 2022
Climate TRACE releases its first facility-level inventory, covering more than 72,000 individual sources of emissions, representing the biggest known sources of greenhouse gas emissions from more than two dozen industries.
December 2023
Climate TRACE releases its second facility-level inventory, covering more than 352 million emissions sources, with detailed metadata providing unprecedented insight into the facilities driving the climate crisis and how to help fix them.
November 2024
In 2024, Climate TRACE released its third facility level inventory covering more than 660 million individual facilities / sources of GHGs, including several new subsectors, co-pollutants that harm human health, and monthly emissions estimates projects through the end of 2024.

Now Recruiting

Climate TRACE member teams are now providing detailed asset-level estimates for sectors making up 75% of global emissions. We still only have national-level estimates for many of the smaller emitting sectors, such as railways and fluorinated gases. Interested in helping the world get to 100% global asset-level coverage? Contact us about joining the coalition or supporting our work!

67366aca7dfb8.png

News & Insights

Sep 10, 2025

WEBINAR: From Financed Emissions to Financing Emissions Reductions

Financed emissions accounting is emerging as a standard tool to measure the carbon impact of investment and lending portfolios and to guide capital toward real-world decarbonization. Advances in highly granular, near-real-time geospatial data now provide unprecedented visibility into asset-level emissions, creating new opportunities for targeted, high-impact investment. Hosted and moderated by Climate TRACE, this webinar included panelists from Climate Risk Services, Joint Impact Model, PCAF, and RMI's Center for Climate-Aligned Finance.
Sep 01, 2025

CSO Futures: Climate TRACE data shows global emissions are still rising (slightly) in 2025

Emissions in the first half of 2025 were 0.13% higher than in the first half of 2024, according to data shared by Climate TRACE.
Aug 29, 2025

Bloomberg: US Fossil Fuel Revival Nudges Global Emissions Higher

A rise in greenhouse gas pollution from fossil fuels — particularly in the US — was a major factor in pushing global emissions higher in the first half, according to Climate Trace data.