UN boss Antonio Guterres unveiled on Wednesday a global greenhouse gas emissions tracker that he hopes will increase transparency about how countries act on their pledges to cut carbon output
MOSCOW (Pakistan Point News / Sputnik - 09th November, 2022) UN boss Antonio Guterres unveiled on Wednesday a global greenhouse gas emissions tracker that he hopes will increase transparency about how countries act on their pledges to cut carbon output.
The Climate TRACE coalition founded by former US Vice President Albert Gore said the initiative provided timely emissions data for every country that had agreed to reduce carbon emissions as part of the 2015 Paris climate deal.
"Initiatives like Climate TRACE are ushering in an era of radical transparency for emissions tracking - providing independent data based primarily on direct observation," Guterres said at the UN climate change conference in Egypt's Sharm El-Sheikh.
Climate TRACE combines satellite coverage, remote sensing and artificial intelligence to spot sources of greenhouse gas emissions and analyze emitting activities that are otherwise undetectable.
"This level of granularity means that we finally have emissions data that enable us to act decisively," Gore told the conference.
The coalition said that real emissions were sometimes three times higher than self-reported data. The data it presented shows that the top 500 individual sources worldwide represented less than 1% of total facilities in Climate TRACE's dataset yet accounted for 14% of global emissions in 2021.