Civil servants in ministries of environment around the world, able to x-ray their country's climate profile at the click of a button. They could monitor mitigation and adaptation efforts, analyze changes over time, anticipate challenges, and adjust courses quickly and cost-effectively. This is not about more processes. It's about more results. So we are proud also to announce that the Republic of Uganda is joining us as the first pilot country, demonstrating leadership and commitment to innovation. Ahead of the next global stocktake, we invite other countries to participate and help shape data-driven climate action. But let us be clear, our aspiration must be to ensure data equity. Every country, especially in developing nations, must have access, capacity, and ownership of the tools they need. Every byte of data should move us closer to climate action on the ground. And the story of COP 30 is one of implementation that delivers for people: more jobs, stronger growth, better health, and more resilient communities. Data will tell us whether we are moving fast enough to secure those benefits. So in conclusion, colleagues, let's work to turn information into transformation, working together across governments, UN agencies, academia, and technology partners. Let's make this decade when climate data becomes climate action across every country, every sector, and every person. With that, I am now honored to invite former US Vice President Al Gore to share his perspective and vision for harnessing data and technology in our collective effort to accelerate climate action. Thank you very much, sir. Give it up.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Danielle. And thank you for stepping in for Simon, and we wish him and his team well in dealing with the events of last evening. I recognize a lot of friends and partners and associates here. In just a moment, I'm going to invite my co-founder of Climate Trace, Gavin McCormick, to come up and he and I are going to do a joint presentation on behalf of the 165 members of the Climate Trace Coalition, some of which, by the way, are here. Debbie Gordon of RMI is here, and Sashen Sachi from Sea Tree is here, a leading expert in the world on oil and gas. John Kry of RMI is also here. Climate Trace is independent, privately funded. I want to thank my partners at Generation Investment Management. David Blood, Clara Barbie, and Eduardo Mufures, the partners actually provided some of the seed money to start this coalition, and the Generation Foundation continues to help finance it. And some of our friends from the Minderoo Foundation are here as well. Andrew Forrest is not here, but we were with him a couple of days ago.
And six years ago next month, Gavin McCormick and I co-founded the Climate Trace Coalition. We've been working very hard along with a lot of people who are here in this room. And without any further ado, I want to ask Gavin to come up and join me on stage. And together we're going to present this presentation. I'm told that some of these slides may have a little bit of a blue tint, but just don't worry about that. 33 years and five months ago, the entire world gathered here in Brazil for the Earth Summit. That's what started all of this COP process. It took three years before COP 1 was organized by the young environment minister of Germany, Angela Merkel. And here we are at COP 30, which is kind of a full circle moment. And of course, the purpose is to deal with the climate crisis. And this thin blue shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet is so thin it's only five to seven kilometers thick. It's blue because that's where the oxygen is. And we are using it as an open sewer for 175 million tons of man-made global warming pollution spewed into it every single day. It adds up. It lingers there. And the accumulated amount today will trap as much extra heat as would be released by 750,000 first-generation atomic bombs exploding on the earth every 24 hours. Literally insane that we're allowing this to continue.
In any case, the temperatures are going up because of that. Last year was the hottest year in recorded history, and the consequences have been spelled out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. One that needs more attention is drought. This is the prevalence of drought in the 1950s. And there has been a 299% increase since then. Here's what it looks like today. 61% of all the land mass on Earth last year experienced at least one month of extreme drought. We have seen it right here in the Amazon region, the worst drought on record. And in the Colombian part of the Amazon River basin, the flow of the water receded 90%. We've seen it on every continent, including Europe, for example, where some farmers are abandoning their farms because of the continuing droughts.
And when the temperatures reach record high levels, this was the all-time temperature record earlier this year in Turkey, the fires become much more common. In the last 20 years, the extreme fires have doubled in their intensity and their frequency. This is the third year in a row that Canada has had massive, record-breaking fires. We smell the smoke in my farm in Tennessee, in the south part of the US. It goes around the world actually now. And from fire to ice, Antarctica is beginning to melt much more rapidly. Just two weeks ago, a new study pointed out that this Hector glacier retreated 8 kilometers in only two months. That's 10 times faster than the previous record. You may have heard the news about this 600-year-old village in Switzerland. 90% of it was wiped out by a glacial avalanche. There are other such events around the world. It's most threatening in the Himalayan region. And we need to adapt as well as mitigate. But we need to also be realistic about the fact that some things, if we allow this insanity to continue using the sky as an open sewer, some things will be very difficult to adapt to.
So, Greenland, in the hour that we have been here this morning, Greenland has lost another 30 million tons of ice. Every hour of every day, 30 million tons disappear from Greenland. That's one of the reasons The Economist had this cover story last year saying that we could lose $25 trillion in the global housing market within the next 25 years because of sea-level rise and other consequences of the climate crisis. If you look at all of the extra heat that's been trapped that has been melting the ice and causing the droughts on the land and atmospheric temperatures, how does that compare to what's going into the oceans? 93% of all this extra heat goes into the oceans down 2,000 meters and below. And shockingly, half of this increase has been in the last 20 years. This is one reason why, according to Johan Rockström and other experts, that the tipping point on corals may have been crossed. 84% of the world's coral reefs have been affected in the last two years. And of course, as the oceans heat up, they evaporate more moisture into the sky, and the atmospheric rivers become much stronger and much more frequent. This is one from the Gulf of Mexico that's quite persistent, coming into the southeastern part of the United States.
And so when those atmospheric rivers release their moisture, the downpours get much bigger. Some of the scientists call them 'rain bombs.' Now, just a few days ago, just last week, 1.7 meters of rain fell in 24 hours in the city of Hai Phong, Vietnam. Five and a half feet in one day. This is unfortunately becoming quite common. Just six days ago, the first of two giant typhoons hit the Philippines. The second one hit two days ago. One million people were evacuated, half a million from the one last week. And on October 28th, this rapidly intensifying hurricane hit Jamaica. Incidentally, it hit Jamaica the exact same day that some well-known climate advocate said, 'Time to dial back the emphasis on climate mitigation and focus on one of the effects of the climate crisis.' Damages included perhaps one-third of the GDP of Jamaica. Just a thousand kilometers to the east, by the way, Simon Stiell's home island, Carriacou, was devastated. 90% of the structures devastated one year earlier in Carriacou, where his grandmother still lives.
So in September, half of India experienced massive flooding, hundreds of thousands of people displaced. A month before that, two million were affected by these downpours in Pakistan. 800 people killed. In China, there have been multiple rain bombs. This one dropped 54 cm in only eight hours. And here in Brazil, farther to the south in Rio Grande do Sul, they had another massive event this year. But one year earlier, they had the worst flooding in the entire history of Brazil. 600,000 people displaced by this flooding. Flooding in my home state of Tennessee and neighboring North Carolina and that region. 500 people were killed last fall by the downpours associated with Hurricane Helene. In four days, we had more water fall from the sky than falls over Iguazu Falls in two and a half years. How long are we going to stand by and keep turning the thermostat up so that these kinds of events get even worse?
And a thousand kilometers to the west of here, where the great confluence of the Rio Negro and the Rio Solimões form the Amazon River, these highly intelligent, conscious, special beings, the pink dolphins, are now in danger of extinction. And the biologists to a person warn us this is the most serious consequence of the climate crisis. But there are others, including climate refugees. We've seen a few million climate refugees trigger neo-authoritarianism and ultra-nationalism. The WHO climate group warns us that the areas that are now physiologically unlivable for human beings because of the temperature and humidity, relatively small in those dark areas, are now expanding and could, if we don't make rapid changes over the next 35 years, include heavily populated areas in India, Pakistan, Central America, Africa, South America, including Benin, by the way, that's in the area that could become physiologically unlivable right here where we are meeting.
So, you know, the same day that Bill Gates released his backtracking on climate, which got a rave review from Donald Trump, the very same day, the highly respected Lancet Commission released its update saying that these health threats from climate have reached unprecedented levels. And the WHO has long since said the climate crisis is the single biggest health threat facing humanity. So how is it that these represent a binary we have to choose between them? It's as if we're looking for more money for health. You know, one place we could get it: the trillions of dollars that governments are using to subsidize fossil fuels and cause the worsening of the climate crisis. Now, of course, the elephant in the room and in many rooms these days is the new administration of Donald Trump, which has ordered the EPA to stop collecting climate data. One of the many reasons why Climate Trace was formed was to give independent sources of accurate data. We look at the globe and we have measured, identified, and measured all of the significant sources of global warming pollution. Every one of these columns represents, by its height, the extreme emissions. You can click on, you can zoom in and click on the top of any column and see what is there. And I'm going to turn it over to Gavin now to tell you in more detail what we do.
Great. Thank you. So what we do at Climate Trace is we use satellites, AI, and other data to monitor emitting facilities. So essentially every power plant, ship, landfill, and so on in the world. And we have many different experts coming together to do this. And so the first thing I'd like you to notice about what you can do with the data is we can add it up. So if you look at that number in the top left, you will see that is the largest emissions inventory ever. And the reason for that is we can see evidence clearly from space of many emitting facilities that are not in any inventory. We can see landfills that governments don't know about. We can see cattle farms that supposedly don't exist. We can see oil fields that have not fully reported their emissions. We can do a lot more too. And so the next thing we can do is we can slice and dice the data. So for any country, state, county, large city, or increasingly even many companies, we can look at all of the facilities in that area and we can add up the emissions and then you can continue to go. So you can actually dive down into any emitting facility. So we have 745 million sources of emissions and you can get the data. And this is split up by economic sector. You can get the CO2 or the methane or the CO2 equivalent. You can see this all together. But let's talk about what happens when you really zoom in. So here we're today to talk about something new that we're doing. And the preview is that we actually have extremely detailed information besides just the emissions about these facilities. So we can tell you estimates of the monthly emissions. In many cases, we know who owns the facilities. We can see the technology type. In addition to the greenhouse gases, we can now see the conventional air pollutants like SO2 and PM2.5. And the reason for this is that the same facilities that are causing climate change are in almost every case the ones that are making us sick on a human level. And so it's those same pollutants that cause both effects.
Yeah. One aspect of the climate crisis that is sometimes overlooked is that the same combustion process that puts the global warming pollution into the sky and traps the heat also puts so-called conventional pollutants, PM2.5, some people call them, that makes people sick. This is also a severe health threat. By the way, the WHO has identified seven of these pollutants that are particularly harmful. We have traced 100% of them back to their source. This is what it looks like in Mumbai. You can go to thousands of cities and see where the pollution streams are flowing depending on the meteorological data of that particular day. This is Tokyo. I'll just show you a few examples. As I say, there are thousands of them and soon we will have them all. And I hope on a daily basis so that perhaps in the future weather forecasters can use it along with their weather radar. This is London. This is New York City. There's the UN headquarters. And here is Belém. And you can see where we are right now. This is Manaus, elsewhere not too far from here. And worldwide, this conventional pollution from the burning of fossil fuels kills 8.7 million people every year. It's been out of sight, out of mind, but now we can see the plumes, where it's coming from, and where it's going. So, Climate Trace tracks all of this pollution all over the world and fuses it together. Here you go.
The mic. So, we fuse together data from over 300 satellites from six countries, the European Union, many commercial providers. By far the largest source of data is Planet. So, I'd like to give a shout out here to our representative from Planet today. And just say a particular thank you to Will Marshall from Planet who has been so generous in providing data more than any other company or in fact country. And so what we can do with that information, we historically have focused on just describing the results but wanted to give you a sense that in the upper left you can see this is what a facility looks like when it's not emitting. This is a facility looks like when it's under construction. So our machine learning algorithms have learned to recognize what does a cattle farm actually look like when the cows are indoors. But we can actually now analyze them in much more detail. So we can tell you this facility is actually not emitting. An example of how we know that is in the upper right hand corner, the manure pond is not yet full. And so you can actually see the difference between a facility in use at different levels. And by analyzing data like this, what we can do is we can combine top-down imagery from satellites about how much methane is in an area, bottom-up information about what's going on in these facilities, and we can calibrate to achieve better accuracy by mixing and matching the methods. And so it's very important to understand about Climate Trace that we are not one organization with one data set. We're closer to Wikipedia. We are combining every single public source of information in a massive coalition of over 150 NGOs, universities, and other AI researchers working together to combine this. As an example of how it works, in the upper left, we have photos where we had on-site sensors of the exact emissions happening at that facility at that moment, and we have satellite imagery of what they looked like. And you can see with the unaided eye there's a difference. And so we can train machine learning algorithms to recognize for a certain type of technology, what does a certain amount of emissions look like? And then one reason we're able to do this is we're able to calibrate it through generous donations of data from over 50,000 facilities. We have the detailed on-site sensor readings of exactly what are their emissions. And that's just one more way we can combine all this data to be more accurate. And so there are now 40 peer-reviewed papers that are either analyzing Climate Trace methods, validating them or applying the data or increasingly most papers do all three. And so historically we have been known for measuring emissions and what we're here to share today is we have a new capability. So by analyzing the data of what is going on in these facilities, we can actually do more. We can look for examples of facilities that have successfully decarbonized and we can find how is it that they got it done and then we can match other facilities in similar climate zones with similar technology and we can increasingly estimate based on what other facilities successfully did what are the options for this facility to do better. So in terms of data into action let's just use an example. So Glenbrook Mill in New Zealand is a leader in applying electric arc furnace technology with renewable energy. This is really reducing their emissions. We can then find identical technology types in other facilities worldwide and estimate what would their emissions reduction be if they did that. And the big value here is instead of doing this at a vague level, we have 700 million facilities that we're able to give very specific detailed recommendations of what would work for them. You start adding up these applications and we see for example 800 million tons a year could be reduced by applying just these techniques at compatible facilities. And we can also start to have tips about when it's a better idea. So for example steel plants, it is vastly cheaper to electrify them if you catch them at the moment they are relining. We increasingly know when and where that's happening. So this is finding ways to make it easier to know how to reduce emissions. To give you an example, we can compare two different facilities from the same company, Nippon Steel. We can compare their emissions factors and can start to see what are the clues of why one is cleaner than the other and what could be done about it. We can then for all steel mills in the world line up which ones are cleaner and which ones are less clean. Companies can buy from the lower emitting facilities and get advice on how they can become one of the lower emitting facilities. But the big thing is that we've received such positive feedback about doing that in a small way in steel, we're here to share today that we can now do this for every emitting sector. And so these are the emissions factors from nine representative sectors. As you can see, they vary dramatically. In every sector, we see examples of those that have successfully reduced their emissions and those that have not yet successfully reduced their emissions and we can apply examples of how they can do it. An example is electricity. Everyone knows that renewable energy is a great example of reaching zero emissions factor. But what we also know is where and when is this happening? So here's an example of Nanticoke generating station. Formerly the largest coal plant in North America, now a solar plant. And so we are seeing increasingly that it makes sense economically for facilities to make these changes.
I also wanted to give a shout out to Planet by the way and tell you that the CEO Will Marshall, my good friend, is in Antarctica today. So that's why he is not here. But we're glad you're here, Andrew. So, one of the reasons this solar revolution is so stunning, it's absolutely amazing, is that the cost continues to come down quite dramatically, and it's not only the panels, it's not only the modules, it's the panels, the business models, the installation, and everything else. It used 20 years ago, it took a year to install one gigawatt of solar. Now, it takes 15 hours. And it will soon take only a few hours to expand by another gigawatt. And with solar and wind and also batteries, countries face no fuel supply chain risk, no risk of fuel price volatility, no fuel cost at all. And by the way, the rapid transition away from fossil fuels as called for in COP 28 will also have an effect on 40% of all shipping in the world that is presently used to lug fossil fuels from one place to another. There are so many savings that will come from using this poly-solution to the poly-crisis. Of all the new electricity capacity added worldwide last year, 93% was renewable. Absolutely astonishing. And where did the money come from to build all that solar and wind? It's pretty interesting to focus on where it came from. 75% came from private investors.
But there is an unequal distribution of access to private capital. The great science fiction writer William Gibson once wrote, 'The future's already here. It's just not evenly distributed.' Well, access to private capital for the sustainability transition is already here, but it's not evenly distributed. The entire continent of Africa has fewer solar panels than the single state of Florida. That is, in my opinion, a kind of disgrace for humanity. We need to fix this desperately. Africa has 60% of the best solar resources in the world but gets only 2% of the finance to install renewables in Africa. Now here is the emissions reduction potential in the rich developed countries. Very important, needs to accelerate. But here's the potential in the developing countries. Three times as many opportunities to reduce emissions in the developing world as in the developed world. Essentially 100% of all the increasing emissions in the years going forward are going to be in the developing world. So we have got to fix the unequal access to private capital in order to accomplish this transition because at present only 17% of global climate finance went to developing nations other than China. So we could reduce 1.6 billion tons of CO2 each year by building in the developed nations. And we could reduce 2.6 billion tons by building the same amount of solar and wind capacity in developing nations. So prioritizing what we're doing is quite important. Some private sector companies are now taking leadership on their own using Climate Trace data. By the way, this is a wind farm in India. You can see many other windmills behind this one in the foreground. They use Climate Trace data to pick the locations where they will maximize the reductions of emissions. Apple is doing the same thing. Salesforce is doing the same thing. A lot of smaller companies are doing it as well. This particular wind farm will reduce 130% more emissions than it would do if it was built in Seattle in the United States next to the Amazon headquarters. So we have taken this approach with all of these sectors. We've got nine illustrative sectors. Let's look at road transport. One of the other systemic solutions to the climate crisis is electrifying the transportation system. Look at the example of success in Shanghai where 70% of new vehicle sales are now electric and they built out their charging network. If that approach was used in Tokyo, we could see a reduction of almost 50% in the emissions from transportation and a reduction of 24 million tons of CO2 each year by more fully transitioning to EVs. And if we did this globally, we could reduce 73 billion tons over the next 25 years. 2.8 billion tons per year. And by the way, we've got the momentum now. In September, 30% of all new car sales in the world were EVs, 58% in China, 98.9% in Norway. I think they can check that box. For the full year 2024, Ethiopia had 60% of all its new car sales were EVs. This is happening and it's happening in these other sectors as well. Let's look at buildings.
So buildings is just another example of where we're actually seeing the energy transition really happen. So with a few exceptions, those are mostly Iranian buildings over on the far right seem to have particularly low energy efficiency. Enormous opportunity to do better. With a few exceptions, we're seeing this start to happen everywhere. So Copenhagen is a good example that has successfully reduced their building emissions by 50% in a few years. It really worked and it was actually quite economical. And so we can do calculations like for example Toronto could benefit. And so this free open-source tool can provide information. So for example, if you were in Toronto, what would be roughly the cost and the emissions impact of doing the same? And similarly, we can calculate the emissions of applying the solution elsewhere and sort of the same idea happens. So I won't bore you with the same speed. I'll sort of go through these quickly, but in forest fires, remarkable progress has been made in Uganda. I'm very excited. We have someone on the panel with us in a moment from Uganda. But it is a country that has really demonstrated how to push back on clearing and forest fire emissions and we're able to calculate things like in certain regions of Ghana, what would be the application if you were to apply those same methods and the total savings worldwide would be quite striking. In landfills we see similar patterns. So we can look for example before and after of landfills. It is actually quite striking visually on what happens when you cover them and successfully clean up their emissions and then we can apply them to facilities like in Indonesia what would be the equivalent savings and get the total emissions. And then one of the things we really see in the data is the significant difference between areas... yes, so clicked a little too fast there. In terms of covering landfills what we find is that typically the difference between doing nothing at all and doing something is much bigger than the difference between using a pretty good emissions reducing technology and a very good emissions reducing technology. And so by knowing where in the world has something already been done, you can figure out how to optimize how to spend fewer resources but actually cause more emissions reductions. So a quick example of that is we were asked to analyze what would be the impact of cleaning up the world's 100 largest landfills, 66 million tons. We actually figured out that for lower cost, you could reduce almost twice as much emissions by identifying the landfills where the least had been done. And the highest emitting landfills are not the same as the largest landfills. And so the basic thing that this data can do is free open-source data on how you can drive more climate action faster with the same or often even actually literally less resources. We see similar patterns by learning from Thailand's very successful emissions reducing program in rice by using smarter fertilizer. We can see that Myanmar could very successfully reduce rice emissions, a major driver of methane, and calculate that globally and so we continue that for other sectors.
Yeah, thank you. All right, cattle manure management and feed additives made from certain kinds of seaweed. We found that the state of Colorado could use this technique, daily manure spreading, which a lot of farmers are beginning to do already, and the use of certain feed additives that are showing tremendous promise in reducing the enteric fermentation and the methane releases. And if these strategies were used by cattle farmers around the world, we could reduce 16 billion tons by 2050. Very significant amount. If you look at crop fires, some of these worst crop fires are in India, some other places as well on the right hand side. But if you look at the success in the Buenos Aires region in Argentina with residue removal without burning, if that technique were used in Madhya Pradesh state in India, there could be a reduction of 18.5 million tons per year. And by the way, the news media reported just two days ago rare massive public protests in India about the air pollution coming in significant measure from the annual crop burning. So again the same global warming combustion that produces the global warming pollution is producing air pollution. If we did this worldwide, 35 billion tons could be reduced by 2050. Let's look at coal mines. Of course, we want to phase out all coal mines as quickly as possible. But while they are operating, it's important to look at some success stories like this coal mine in Poland, which has been capturing and using its methane as a substitute energy source. They've been recognized by Europe for their success. If this same technique was used for this coal mine in China and others as well, then we could reduce emissions by more than half from that coal mine and a significant amount overall. And worldwide, if this approach were used in the coal mines where it's applicable, we could reduce another 17 billion tons by 2050. So, we're very excited to be here with the UNFCCC. Thank you so much because the UNFCCC has announced today that its collaboration with Climate Trace, also with Planet and other partners, to support countries in identifying the sources of emissions, ranking them, and then generating early warnings where action is advisable and practical mitigation opportunities. Ajay Banga is doing a terrific job leading the World Bank Group. They are now using Climate Trace data to evaluate assets that are being considered for loans to reduce emissions. The C40 and the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy are now using Climate Trace data to measure cities' emissions and to craft high-impact detailed policies to reduce them. MSCI, you talk about this one.
Sure. So, anyone in the financial industry may know about MSCI, which supports 95% of the world's largest asset managers. We're very lucky to have someone from MSCI with us today. And they announced last week they will be using Climate Trace data so that you can pair emissions that are financial about an asset with data that is financial with data that is about emissions with the same assets. And we see this pattern over and over. So, PCAF, the largest financial standard for carbon accounting, announced that it will be using Climate Trace. The Joint Impact Model, you may not have heard of them, but central banks certainly have. They're the largest provider of emissions data to central banks. They are using Climate Trace. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which supports 200 of the world's largest companies on their emissions reducing plans, is increasingly using Climate Trace data. The Subnational Methane Action Coalition, essentially the same idea for states and reducing methane. And so, what we wanted to leave you with is just sort of one thought about why and what is the punchline. So as I mentioned the really striking thing that this free open source data that anyone can use is it is possible to reduce more emissions with less work in most cases by using data to prioritize. So just to give you an example anyone can now as of this morning go to the Climate Trace website and go for any country, any city, any state and get a sense of what we estimate is a customized list of emissions reducing solutions lined up from essentially easiest to hardest. This is still new or a little bit imperfect at measuring easy and hard, but we have a pretty good sense. And what you will see is that not only can you get a sense of how much emissions you could reduce, but what things might be faster and easier. Every institution we have spoken with about this plan has said, okay, some things that maybe need work, but basically there are opportunities for them to essentially save money and time, but drive more impact by using data to make smarter choices. And so, in everyone's plan, you can see the list of things that we recommend doing on the left. Feel free to use as many or as few recommendations as you like but we'll tell you which ones are easy and then the individual facilities to use them at. And if you look at different facilities and different groups they're all different so India's plan is wildly different than São Paulo state and that's because they have a different economy, different technology types and different list of assets. And so the last thing I wanted to share with you, this is Uganda's recommended plan. Obviously we are not saying this is the plan currently that the nation of Uganda is using but it would reduce the same amount of emissions as the NDC and it has some tips about ways to go even faster potentially by spending fewer resources.
So again, we want to thank all of our coalition members. Our mission is to live up to, is to bring to life the old business phrase, you can only manage what you measure. We're now measuring essentially all of the greenhouse gas emissions and now the particulate pollutants that are making so many people sick and causing such a health crisis around the world. So Climate Trace is accessible on the website climatrace.org. You can go to
[email protected]. We are very excited about these new tools. We're very glad for our partnerships that we've gone through here and we've got the technology, we've got the deployment models, we have now the measurement. Some people worry we don't have enough political will. As I always try to remind people, political will is a renewable resource. Thank you very much for being here. And now we'll come up to the panel.
Thank you. I'm going to ask our panel members to come up here now. And let's see. David Gonasa, the team lead Industry 4.0 and head of special projects at the Ministry of Science, Technology, and Innovation in the office of the president of the government of Uganda. David, your good friend. Thank you so much. Have a seat and join us. James Grabert, director of the mitigation division of UNFCCC. Thank you very much, Jim. Look forward to hearing from you all. Linda Eling Lee, founding director and head of the MSCI Institute. Linda, thank you so much for being here. And I don't know whether to say her honor, her... I always say that I'm introduced as 'your adequacy,' but let me introduce Jane Lomax-Smith, Lord Mayor of Adelaide, Australia. Thank you very much. I personally hope we'll be seeing you next year. But that's out of line in saying that. And Andrew...
Zullie, chief impact officer of Planet. Thank you very much. Andrew, thank you for joining us. I'm going to start with one question for the entire panel. And it is, I'd just like to ask each one of you individually. This is kind of a lightning round. We're going to get to some specific questions for each of you, but as an introduction to your work, I would like each of you to share one striking statistic or piece of data that underscores the importance of climate action in your jurisdiction or work. Lord Mayor.
Well, we obviously live in a place that's very hot, very dry, the driest state in the driest continent, and we have bush fires and occasional floods. But in capital cities and cities across Australia, the real impact of the climate crisis is being felt. And our data shows that our city is getting hotter. Over 15 years, we've had five times increase in the number of days over 40. And believe me, when it's 38 degrees, you can't walk to the shops. You can't play sport. And once it's over 40, it actually impacts on the economy as well. We had one day six years ago that was 47.7 degrees and in an urban environment that is bad. So we have to cool our streets. We have to cool our homes and we have to have climate justice for those people who can't afford energy.
Good on you David Gahasa.
Uganda has about 10% forest cover and I made a joke earlier when it rains it's cool there as well. But you have 40% of the country that's prone to drought. Now yes, we're getting great rewards from our forest action. However, what's happening to the 40% and we need to rethink how do we drive or use innovation to start fixing some of the other really large huge problems that we have in the country.
Thank you very much. Let's go. Andrew Zullie, chief impact officer of Planet.
I really appreciated your point about not being able to manage what you don't measure. One of the very first digital public goods we ever built at Planet was a program designed to map all of the world's coral reefs, which were exquisitely vulnerable to climate disruptions because of all that excess ocean heat. And one of the things we discovered was that there's 25% more corals on Earth than anyone had ever thought of. There's actually more treasure to measure than most of us are walking around thinking about. And so that led to the creation of some 30 new marine protected areas around the world when we began to actually see what was there. So that mechanism I think is what's really exciting to us.
Thank you. Thank you very much. Linda Eling Lee, founding director and the head of MSCI.
Sure. It's wonderful to be here. Just quickly, you know, MSCI is best known in the financial industry for being a leading index provider with 17 trillion dollars of assets and a trillion of that is actually climate and sustainability indexes. Now, the striking statistic that I can think of that many people might not know is that since the Paris agreement, listed companies in developed markets have actually increased their sales by 50% while decreasing their emissions by 18%. So I think companies are actually showing that you can actually decouple growth with emissions. Now I think Simon Steel announced a couple of weeks ago that emissions peak is on the horizon. But it's not happening fast enough and we still see that emissions and growth are rising in tandem in emerging markets and I think that really underscores how much we need to pay attention to the companies in emerging markets.
Thank you very much. James Graver, director of the mitigation division at UNFCCC, somebody we work very closely with. And thank you very much, James.
No, the number is 12%. We saw from the 113 NDCs we've received that these are the latest pledges. We're looking at 12% reduction by 2035 from 2019. IPCC says it needs to be 60.
Thank you very much. Okay. So the first topic we want to turn to formally is about examples of turning data into action. And I'm going to come back to you, James. In what ways does a data-driven approach strengthen global climate governance and how does it help parties meet their reporting and implementation commitments?
Thank you. So as I was just saying the NDCs we all know they're the compass for effective climate action. They give us an indication if we're doing what we need to do. And we have them firmly anchored in what the Paris agreement has asked us to do in terms of governance. Precisely recognizing every individual nation has a contribution and that's important. That's why the data is important. There are challenges these countries face. Let's be honest. There are some countries, you know, I think are flying blind in terms of data gaps. We need to solve that. And that's why we're also interested in working very closely with the many partners here today. But we cannot stand by and not have access to reliable data available to everyone. So that's why this is so important. The NDCs are the backbone and data is needed. And we certainly hope with this monitoring some of the things we heard today the possibilities to at least on the basis of interest from countries identify those possibilities identify those opportunities for renewable energy identify those opportunities for improved resilience all kinds of mitigation opportunities and that's what we're looking for.
Thank you. So Andrew, give us some other examples of how Planet has seen satellite data drive climate action.
That's great. Thanks very much for the question. I think one foundational idea is, let me give you something. How many aerospace engineers are actually in the room. I'm sort of half expecting his hand to go up also. He's an honorary one. Right. So for the vast majority of you that are not aerospace engineers, let me give you something for your next cocktail party, which is whenever you put something into space, whatever its primary purpose is, you have to put all kinds of extra instruments on that satellite so that you can continuously measure the forces of change that are acting on that instrument because otherwise it could, if you're not constantly measuring it could tumble out of orbit and so you have to measure change at least as fast as change is occurring. Well, the punchline of this story is we live on a satellite. It just happens to have eight billion other astronauts on it. Has to go around the sun rather than going around the earth. And we have to measure the forces of change that are acting on it at least as fast as those forces are unfolding. And so that's what we set out to do at Planet and to build a kind of general purpose real time monitoring system for the earth. So let me give you three ways in which we can use this data beyond the things that Gavin and the Vice President are doing today that are about using this real time information to enable new kinds of climate actions.
The first one represented by a whole suite of different organizations is to create the kind of digital measurement reporting and verification that are responsible for enabling carbon markets. What you see here is the combination of satellite data and other forms of remote sensing data, particularly LiDAR data that allows us to get at forest biomass and forest carbon. That independent measurement and reporting and verification of those things is essential because if you want a market to function, you have to have independently auditable things that you can say this is this asset and this is how it's performing because we can measure it every day. We can actually see how that carbon flux is changing. And there are people here like Cissan and others who are doing extraordinarily important work in this area. I'm going to, I don't know if this is going to work. Oh, there we go. Okay. So, here for example, just as a picture of the satellite imagery at the top, the carbon is at the bottom. And one of the things you'll see is that there's all kinds of fluctuations in the carbon that you can't see with your naked eye. And that's what comes when you combine AI and machine learning and this kind of remote sensing.
Now the second one is about a really important new kind of satellite. So a lot of the work that Gavin and the extraordinary list of organizations at Climate TRACE are doing, they're modeling emissions. They're inferring emissions. And what gets really powerful is when you combine those modeled and inferred emissions with directly observed emissions. This is a new instrument that was privately philanthropically financed produced at a joint cooperation between Planet and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA and a whole suite of other extraordinary organizations including RMI and others in the room called Tanager and it directly observes many different phenomena but in particular methane emissions. Go to the next slide. So let me just show you what this looks like. What you see on the left there is a methane plume that's directly observed in the Permian basin. And what you're seeing there is the optical satellite imagery around it tells you exactly what facility is being affected where the leak is occurring. And this information due to the extraordinary work of this group called Carbon Mapper which is another core member of this coalition of actors alerting the regulator who in turn alerts the asset holder says you have a leak and two weeks later we come back and the leak is closed. So that is the direct mitigation of climate emissions in front of your eyes. And so it's proof positive that it's happening and proof positive that it's been eliminated.
And if you go to, I'm going to just ask to go to the next slide. Just in the state of California since the California Air Resources Board got started, this is just the beginning, but they've already avoided some 18,000 cars worth of emissions on an annual basis just from the leaks. They've closed and we're just at the very beginning of being able to do this. The last one if we could go through and this is by the way go to the Carbon Mapper website. It's really amazing. Tons of methane plumes being integrated into the Climate TRACE ecosystem as we speak and go to the next one if you wouldn't mind. I just thought you'd like to see this. This is maybe, could you guys rerun that slide one more time? Deforestation deep in the Amazon. It's going to flicker. What you're maybe not going to work on this slide, but what you'd see is you'd see the spread of deforestation spreading across. This is a couple of weeks of deforestation sped up to the point of a few seconds. And what you see right after the deforestation occurs are these little spiderwebs. And the little spiderweb are the visual signal of the next round of deforestation that's about to occur. They're the illegal roads that go in before the next round of deforestation occurs.
If you could go to the next slide, I'll just show you we've been training AI to find all of those signals of deforestation and about to occur deforestation incipient deforestation and then with colleagues here in Brazil at an organization called IPAM built a tool if you could go to the next slide which finds every act of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon on a weekly basis and literally hundreds of thousands of users in hundreds of organizations are using this information right now, including and especially the Brazilian federal police. And I want to just tell you what they do with those alerts is they turn them into environmental interdiction warrants. And if you go to the last slide, this is the end. Here they are in the field blowing up the equipment that is responsible for deforestation. In fact, in the last five years, if you just scroll ahead one more click, maybe, we've seen with this tool connecting real-time satellite information and AI to people on the ground taking action, some more than 400 enforcement actions. And this slide has a slight technical typo. It says 4.93 billion Brazilian real collected. It's actually $4.39 US dollars billion collected by the government in fines and everywhere this tool has been used it's been led, this is not our numbers these are their numbers, to a 54% reduction in the rates of deforestation. So that's what it looks like when we actually connect those kinds of signals to real concrete actions on the ground.
Thank you Andrew and our coalition. Good job. Good job. We're so fortunate at Climate TRACE to be able to integrate this data along with the other data sets and the Carbon Mapper examples you showed. I want to give a shout out to Mike Bloomberg who helps support that organization as well. So let's see, I want to go to you now David and hear more about Uganda. What specific sectors or adaptation priorities would benefit most from improved data infrastructure and planetary insights? And what forms of support would you expect from a technology consortium to make your NDC implementation more data driven?
So really across all our indices, you can't fix what you can't measure and unfortunately what we seem to see happening is many cases a number of sort of ad hoc solutions being implemented and the worst part about it many times is that you have very many top-down solutions. So you have great remote sensing data sometimes without ground validation and you're building out solutions that according to some model should work but there's no real verification on the ground. So I'll give you an example today. In Uganda, Lake Victoria is choking with algae blooms, right? And there's all sorts of solutions around it, but nothing's really fixing it because we need to say how do we start to do some ground verification as well. How do we get more data collection in country around the different NDC operations we have? We've had methane explosions on landfills. We've had all sorts of things happening because we are not effectively measuring. Right? So what we are doing as a country right now is saying fine can we start to actively use data but not only working through international companies but also building local capacity to build some of these solutions. So you're seeing local companies building sensors that will measure different forest activity for example and then using edge cloud nodes with small language models analyzes data and be able to advise what should be done by the government. So really around policy recommendations but also challenge based innovation. Can we actually say that based on the data we've collected, based on what we're seeing happening within these disaster prone zones or these challenge areas, can we call or invite local innovators to begin to build solutions? Because I had a very good statement yesterday. It says something like action is nothing without ownership. It cannot be top down anymore. It has to be bottom up with locals as part of the solution frame.
Let me underscore that. You're saying action is not about ownership only. It's about who's on the ground and who's doing the work, right? Go ahead.
Without local ownership and local involvement, unfortunately, what you have is some sort of very output-based activity, right? So, we're going to do this. We're going to say, for example, come in and support agroforestry, but then you're not there. So, you don't really know what's going on. And yes, you can have a lot of remote sensing data, but how do we provide or get local involvement to really support climate action?
