The Carbon Impacts Tracer is a world-first open-access online tool allowing users to instantly trace the human and ecological impacts of individual fossil fuel projects.
The tool is designed to put climate attribution science into the hands of researchers, advocates, journalists, governments, insurers, investors and everyday people around the world. It generates climate impact calculations within seconds. The tool provides a new way to quantify the climate damage associated with individual fossil fuel projects, providing a clearer picture of the growing societal cost of new coal, oil, and gas development.
In October 2025, researchers from six universities in Australia and the UK published details of a science-based method to attribute climate impacts to fossil fuel projects. Their study, for the first time, quantified the climate 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 that research.
"Many new fossil fuel projects describe their emissions as negligible in the context of global totals," said Professor Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, Professor of Climate Science in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University and co-author of the study.
"This tool changes that. A journalist, advocate, decision-maker or someone in an affected community can now see exactly what a single project's emissions mean for additional warming, human and climate harms. Every ton of carbon emitted means more warming, more harm, and greater risks."
Claudia Stepin, Research Officer at the Australian National University, who built the online tool and has extended the methodology to include other impacts said, “We can now quantify climate impacts attributable to individual fossil fuel projects, countries or carbon majors anywhere in the world. Expanding the tool to include impacts such as poverty, labour loss and food insecurity allows us to build a much more comprehensive picture of the consequences of fossil fuel emissions.
“Crucially, we can use the tool to look ahead and explore the potential impacts of projects that are still being proposed. Every single potential project matters, and now we can begin to quantify what those impacts could mean before a project is built. This opens up the possibilities for accountability, advocacy and decision-making.”
Dr Wesley Morgan, Research Associate at the Australian Climate Accountability Project of the UNSW Australian Human Rights Institute, said governments had “clear legal obligations to measure the impact of fossil fuel projects and to regulate fossil fuel companies to prevent climate harms”.
The International Court of Justice made clear in July 2025 that a State’s failure to curb greenhouse gas emissions, including through fossil fuel production, “may constitute an internationally wrongful act”.