The Future of Mapping Carbon Emissions, With Pinpoint Precision

Carbon emissions are typically tracked at the country or city level, with the focus occasionally narrowed even more onto a county or Census tract. On a global scale that approach provides a pretty helpful window onto problem areas. If metro areas hope to reduce greenhouse gases further, however, they need to zoom in on those precise spots in the city doing the most damage to the environment.

That's the concept behind a new software system called "Hestia," after the Greek goddess of the hearth, capable of tracing carbon emissions down to individual urban buildings and roads. The Hestia project runs numerous public data sources — local air pollution reports, traffic counts, tax assessment information, and the like — through a modeling system that spits out high-resolution, site-specific greenhouse gas maps of a metro area. The system is sophisticated enough to discern fluctuations in each site's emissions on an hourly basis.