News & Insights

The nonprofit Climate Trace, which Gore co-founded, on Wednesday launched a tool that uses AI to track fine particulate pollution from more than 660 million sources worldwide.

A new interactive map and groundbreaking database from Climate TRACE allows people in the world’s largest metropolitan areas to track their air pollution exposure, along with their region’s biggest sources of planet-warming pollution.

Gore, who co-founded Climate TRACE, which uses satellites to monitor the location of heat-trapping methane sources, on Wednesday expanded his system to track the source and plume of pollution from tiny particles, often referred to as soot, on a neighborhood basis for 2,500 cities across the world.

Since our first data release in 2021, Climate TRACE has tracked greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and have now added non-GHG air pollutants for the world’s largest sources of emissions.

Climate TRACE has developed a global air emissions dataset that provides unprecedented transparency into greenhouse gas (GHG) and non-GHG emissions. To further illuminate the direct impacts of air pollution, Climate TRACE has released plumes data and a web-based tool to visualize this data. This new platform moves beyond annual inventories to provide a current, intuitive look at how harmful particulate matter (PM2.5) from major industrial sources travels and disperses, empowering communities, policymakers, and journalists to connect specific sources of pollution to local air quality.

New Climate TRACE tool enables anyone to see air pollution plumes flow out of sources that contribute to the climate crisis and into more than 2,500 urban areas.