New world-first Carbon Tracer tool calculates the human health and climate impacts of coal, oil and gas projects
A new Carbon Impacts Tracer tool can be used to estimate human health and climate change impacts from emissions across eight metrics, including heat-related deaths, poverty and damage to crop yields.
The open-access platform connects carbon dioxide emissions from major fossil fuel and corporate projects directly to real-world climate impacts such as global warming increments, damage to coral reefs and glaciers, crop yields and human health risks including heat exposure and heat-related deaths.
The tool, developed by researchers from six universities in Australia and the UK published details of a science-based method to attribute climate impacts to specific fossil fuel projects. Their study, for the first time, quantified the impacts of a single project, Woodside’s Scarborough gas development in Western Australia.
The study estimated that Scarborough's 876 million tonnes of lifetime emissions would expose an extra 516,000 people worldwide to unprecedented heat, cause 484 heat-related deaths in Europe by the end of the century, and destroy 16 million additional coral colonies in every future mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef. The Carbon Impacts Tracer builds on this research, giving project assessors and communities opposing coal, oil and gas developments clear evidence of their impacts.
Watch the launch webinar video with the expert developers discussing how the tracer works, the data used to develop it and how they think the app will impact fossil fuel companies still developing new coal, oil and gas.
To learn more and/or support their work, go to UNSW's Australian Human Rights Institute.
