The COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, has unveiled the most detailed data ever about individual facility sources of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions.
It has recognised Ireland as one of the top emitters of greenhouse gases globally.
It found Dublin Airport is the largest polluter in the country.
More than 11,000 sensors located on land, in the air, and at sea, as well as artificial intelligence and machine learning, are where the majority of the independent data from 300 EU, American, and Chinese satellites, as well as other sources, comes from.
In 2021, Dublin Airport alone was responsible for a little over a million tonnes of Ireland’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the database.
The second biggest carbon polluter in Ireland is the Drogheda Cement Plant which spewed out over 983,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases last year.
The Ballyconnell Cement Plant in County Cavan comes in third. Nearly 955 000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions came from that.
All of these three facilities individually put more climate-changing pollution into the atmosphere than the traffic on Dublin’s road network in 2021 which according to new data bank was fourth and the source of 773,000 tonnes of emissions.
The Limerick Cement plant, the Whitegate oil refinery in Cork, and the Corrib gas field, in that order, were the fifth, sixth, and seventh sources of greenhouse gas emissions in Ireland.
These were followed on the league table by the Cement plant at Kinnegad, Co Westmeath and Shannon airport.
Former US Vice President Al Gore launched the new data bank, which was created by the non-profit Climate Trace organisation, which is made up of experts in artificial intelligence, data scientists, researchers, and non-governmental organisations.