How to track the super polluters next door

A new interactive map and groundbreaking database 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.

The tool, which depicts air pollution plumes and their sources, is the work of a nonprofit coalition of scientists, universities and nongovernmental groups called Climate TRACE. The group says the tool is a breakthrough in showing the biggest sources of air pollution down to the facility level for about 2,500 urban areas worldwide.

The new data, which combines hazardous air pollutants known as PM2.5 and greenhouse gases, taps into Climate TRACE’s global inventory of more than 660 million sources of global warming pollutants.

The researchers found that air pollution “super emitters” — facilities that are in the top 10% of all PM2.5 pollution sources by volume — expose a disproportionate amount of people to hazardous air.

Of the 1.6 billion people who live in the high pollution zones, more than half, or about 900 million people, are exposed to air pollution from these super polluters, the scientists concluded.

Climate TRACE is partly funded and led by former US vice president Al Gore, along with dozens of other contributors and professionals in fields ranging from AI to air quality monitoring. The new pollution map includes information on every power plant, heavy manufacturing site, mine, port and refinery in the selected urban areas.

Climate TRACE created the maps by taking its global inventory of climate and air pollution and adding simulations of a year’s worth of weather. The resulting plume tool shows pollution traveling across urban areas on typical days with prevailing conditions, and also on a worst-case scenario day with the most people exposed.

Many of these sites release multiple types of pollutants — some have an acute health threat while others contribute to global warming, which has its own set of health risks.

“We’ve gone from greenhouse gases to the top seven pollutants of concern for health,” said Gavin McCormick, a cofounder of Climate TRACE and cofounder and CEO of WattTime, an environmental tech nonprofit. “In places like the United States, we actually had pretty good data on that already. In most countries, there’s nothing like it, and so that information is the kind of scientific breakthrough here.”

For example, PM2.5 exposure over time can prove lethal to individuals with preexisting conditions like asthma or cardiovascular illness, along with very young or elderly individuals. The airborne particles are small enough to enter the bloodstream or become lodged in the lungs, where they can cause or aggravate respiratory ailments and heart disease.

Such pollutants are responsible for nearly 9 million deaths per year globally, studies show.

Climate TRACE found that about 4 million people in the Houston area — rife with fossil fuel operations — are exposed to air pollution from nearly 140 facilities. But not all super polluters are not all power plants or oil refineries — for example, in Boston as well as Los Angeles and Long Beach, California, domestic shipping in and out of harbors qualifies as a super polluter.

“Ships are gnarly for pollution,” McCormick said.

Only one US metro ranked in the top 10 list of urban areas with the most people exposed to air pollution from major contributors to climate change: New York City. The rest are concentrated in Asia, particularly in China, Korea and Japan.

McCormick said he hopes that visualizing the transport of pollutants and showing people what they may be exposed to can lead to policy changes that reduce emissions from the places that are emitting the most pollutants.

“I didn’t know I was living in the pollution plume of a major emitter, that was pretty striking,” McCormick said. “And there’s about 2 billion people who we’re hoping will look this up and realize that they personally, their health is being affected by the same facilities that are really causing the climate crisis. And I think that’s less of a scientific breakthrough, but I don’t know another tool that does anything like that.”

“It’s one thing to measure how much pollution is coming out of a smokestack, but it’s even more important to see where it ends up,” Gore told CNN in a statement. “My hope is that everyone from grassroots activists to government leaders see these plumes and are equally horrified by the pollution as they are motivated to clean it up and in doing so, address the climate crisis.”

All of Climate TRACE’s emissions tracking data are available for free download to the public, with the hope that it will prove useful for public health and other researchers, as well as people interested in learning more about their region’s pollution sources.

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