The Carbon Transparency Initiative

An ongoing project of the ClimateWorks Foundation, the Carbon Transparency Initiative helps decision makers within the climate community project and track progress toward a low-carbon economy by analyzing the drivers of emissions trends. It also helps ClimateWorks programs and other partners access reliable, consistent information to improve their strategies and track the progress of those strategies over time.

The ClimateWorks Tracker is an important component of the Carbon Transparency Initiative.

This website allows users to evaluate current progress in greenhouse gas emission trends at a glance. The ClimateWorks Tracker displays data and trends for over 130 indicators that determine GHG emission pathways for many of the world’s major economies.

The ClimateWorks Tracker presents data from our Current Development Scenario for Brazil, China, the European Union, India, Mexico, and the United States — which together represent more than half of annual global emissions.

This Current Development Scenario is based on current policies, decarbonization trends, and our evaluation of energy and climate-related investments in nine sectors: power, oil and gas, transport, aviation and marine, buildings, industry, agriculture, waste, and land use change and forestry. The scenario assumes that current climate and energy policies will remain in place and will be fully implemented.

By tracking year-to-year changes, the CTI facilitates the comparison of actual progress to national emissions targets and low-carbon benchmarks and allows for sectoral and regional comparisons. After the original models were published (CTI 2015), refinements to the underlying methodology and the addition of more recent data were used to update the original five models (CTI 2017). We plan to continue to work with our research partners to improve and update the models, with our next update of all six models scheduled for 2019.