A single steel factory in Jiangsu, China, emits 43 million tons of CO2 every year—more than the entire country of Madagascar or Nicaragua. It’s one of more than 70,000 individual sources of climate pollution listed on a new map made from what is now the largest, most detailed database of greenhouse gas emissions in the world. “You can’t manage emissions if you don’t know what they are,” says Gavin McCormick, founder and executive director of WattTime, an environmental tech nonprofit that is part of a coalition of organizations, data scientists, researchers, and artificial intelligence specialists called Climate Trace, which built the inventory and the map. The database includes everything from cargo ships to landfills—the biggest climate polluters in energy production, transportation, waste, agriculture, and heavy industry.
