This tool tells you how fossil fuel emissions actually translate into heat deaths, coral reef damage, and more

Every new fossil fuel project that comes online will emit more climate-warming CO2 emissions into our atmosphere. But just saying how many tonnes of CO2 a new coal or gas facility will produce can still be abstract. 

What does it really mean, for example, that a single coal mine in Australia will generate an estimated 4.7 billion tonnes of emissions over its lifetime? How will those emissions actually, tangibly impact the world and its inhabitants?

A new open-source tool quantifies that impact, translating tonnes of CO2 emissions into measurable damages—like the number of excess heat deaths in Europe, the cost of crop production loss, or how many more coral reef colonies will succumb to bleaching. 

Called the Carbon Impacts Tracer, the tool was created by climate experts at Australia National University and the University of New South Wales, as well as the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the Weather of the 21st Century and the Lethal Humidity Global Council.

The tracer shows how much damage emissions will cause across eight categories:

• excess deaths in Europe
• Great Barrier Reef coral loss
• crop production loss; glacier loss
• the loss of labor hours
• how many more people will be exposed to heat stress
• additional people in poverty
• “human climate niche,” which refers to the narrow range of temperatures in which humans have historically lived

For example, take that Australian coal mine: the Carmichael coal project.

Select it from a list of scenarios in the Carbon Impacts Tracer, and the tool can tell you that those 4.7 billion tonnes of emissions would cause an estimated 2,628 additional heat-related deaths in Europe. 

Or, those emissions could be quantified as an amount of crop loss equivalent to 1.62 million people’s minimum annual food supply, every year. Or, 87.4 million additional coral colonies lost per bleaching event. Or, 248,000 more people tipped into extreme poverty. Or, 1.9 million people left outside of the human climate niche. 

Though the tool includes multiple Australian projects that users can pre-select, it also features a couple international examples, like the Bay Du Nord Project, an offshore oil development off the coast of Canada. 

Brought to you by attribution science

And it includes company-level scenarios, like for fossil fuel giants BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell. And it allows users to enter in a custom emissions amount between 1 million metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent and 10 billion metric tonnes. 

We know that every tonne of carbon dioxide we add to the atmosphere increases global warming, which amplifies climate impacts like heat waves, floods, glacier melt, and so on.

But historically, it’s been difficult to say how much damage a certain amount of emissions or a specific fossil fuel project will actually cause. 

Researchers have been expanding this field, known as attribution science, which helps specify just how big a role climate change plays in specific instances of extreme weather or natural disasters.

By turning emissions into specific heat-related deaths or crop loss figures, the tool’s creators say, it will make both the fossil fuel companies and governments that approve these projects “accountable for the damage they will do.”

“For decades, fossil fuel producers have been able to extract oil, gas and coal and emit pollution to the atmosphere with virtual impunity—even as climate change worsens and damages mount,” the creators wrote for the University of New South Wales.

“But we are entering a new era of accountability,” they continue. “Now that climate attribution science has come of age, it’s no longer possible to hide behind the argument that a new gasfield is just a drop in the ocean. We can now see just how much damage that drop will do to the climate, nature—and to us.”