Skyward Eyes, Tighter Regulations Spotlight Big Climate Pollutants

Satellite monitoring and stringent climate reporting regulations for businesses will increase the transparency of greenhouse gas emissions from large polluters around the world, including Singapore.

This means that emissions data from refineries, power plants, factories and even airports will become more accurate and scrutinized.

In Singapore, there could be more transparency about the top greenhouse gas emitters taxed on their greenhouse gas emissions.

under carbon taxApproximately 50 facilities with annual emissions of 25,000 tons or more are subject to a $5/tonne-year fee.

They report emissions data to the government. But the government has not disclosed the names of the facilities or the emission levels from each, citing the commercial confidentiality and confidentiality provisions of the Carbon Pricing Act.

“Releasing a list of emitters and their emissions without providing context to the nature of their operations or the scale of their operations may not help us understand the extent to which companies are mitigating their emissions. No,” a spokesman for the Ministry of Sustainability and the Environment (MSE) told The Straits Times.

But as governments and companies set tougher emissions reduction targets, transparency becomes essential to monitor progress.

“The energy transition is happening at lightning speed, and data transparency is essential to understanding how energy use and emissions are changing,” said a global energy think tank. As Dave Jones, Head of Insights at Ember, said:

“If governments are really interested in a quick and efficient transition, they need to push for more data to be made public. It is in the public interest.”

Dr. Kim Jeong Won, Senior Research Fellow at the Energy Institute at the National University of Singapore, looks at the design, effectiveness and impact of a global carbon pricing system.

“Under mandatory carbon pricing schemes such as national carbon taxes and emissions trading systems, transparency in carbon emissions data will enable companies to monitor their compliance and more accurately assess environmental impacts such as carbon reductions. “It’s especially essential to assess the

trace and trace

As data transparency becomes more important, a project backed by former U.S. Vice President Al Gore is looking to make emissions sources more visible.

Introduced at the COP27 UN Climate Conference last November, Climate Trace is a public database of nearly 80,000 polluted sites around the world, including Singapore.

The site lists emissions from refineries, power plants, roads, airports, etc. and is growing rapidly with the goal of obtaining facility-level data representing all major known sources of emissions. I’m here.

It targets the main greenhouse gases carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, and aims for monthly and eventually weekly data.

More than 100 organizations are working on the project, and funders include Gore and Google.org.

Information comes from 300 satellites and over 11,000 ground-based sensors, using artificial intelligence to interpret the data and calculate emissions at source.

“We combine many sources because the more we know about each source, the better we are at finding and measuring them,” the group says.

The Climate Trace global map is currently in development. For Singapore, the spokesperson told The Straits Times that Changi Airport and more sites will be added later in the year, along with several refineries and waste plants.