Red Hat Joins OS-Climate, Lends Open Source Leadership to Financial Services Industry Effort to Address Climate Change

By AIT News Desk On Sep 8, 2021

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced that it has joined OS-Climate (OS-C), a Linux Foundation-backed open source project that intends to build the breakthrough technology and data platforms needed to more fully integrate the impacts of climate change in global financial decision-making and risk management. As part of its membership, Red Hat will provide technical acumen and resources to help OS-C build a “Data Commons” that serves as an open data ingestion, processing and management platform for members to collaborate on standardizing and improving the accuracy of corporate climate and environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics. The resulting curated library of public and private sources can then be used to help bankers, asset owners, asset managers and regulators assess climate risk and opportunity as elements of financial decision-making.

OS-C is a non-profit, non-competitive organization that seeks to use open source technology and collaboration to align the efforts of the financial community in addressing the challenge of global climate change while preserving the opportunity to innovate and compete in global capital markets. This approach is a crucial component for closing the $1.2 trillion annual gap in investment needed to achieve Paris Climate Accord goals. The organization’s members include Allianz, Amazon, BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, Microsoft, the Net Zero Asset Owner Alliance and many more technology and financial leaders, with membership having tripled since the community’s launch in September 2020.

Red Hat brings a wealth of experience and expertise in building open source communities for other Linux Foundation projects, serving as a founding member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and many more. Beyond the technical skill to actively contribute code to these initiatives, Red Hat also provides the nuanced understanding of how to encourage collaboration between organizations that would otherwise be competitive in-market.

The open source model championed by Red Hat and selected by OS-C is intended to enable the creation of a complex, multi-layered ecosystem for OS-C members, including an open data platform that can be adopted by individual organizations for their own specific uses. This helps to provide a more level data playing field that meets a variety of regulatory requirements, providing global financial institutions with better, deeper views to evaluate climate change risk and opportunity as a core part of finance, banking and investment strategies.

OS-Climate Data Commons

To help adopt financial flows to the physical and economic market impacts of climate change, financial institutions and banks need a clearer view into an ever-growing tide of related data. To address this need, OS-C is working to build the OS-Climate Data Commons, an open platform that aggregates a variety of structured and unstructured data, from SEC filings and corporate PDFs to scientific and market research, into a single library of trusted data. OS-C’s goal is to make publicly available as much high quality data as possible, while also linking to public and commercial data and enabling its use in open source analytic tools.

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Red Hat’s work around the Data Commons initiative is intended to help create a portable, enterprise-grade data platform that supports members in managing complex data ingestion and processing flows using the latest advances in machine learning. This helps to collate and sanitize public and proprietary data sources, while still supporting compliance requirements around regulatory disclosures. The platform is also intended to provide open, interoperable tooling that organizations can consume alongside their own workflows and internal processes.

As part of its membership, Red Hat will commit a team of eight solutions architects, data engineers and software engineers to the project, emphasizing the creation of OS-Climate Data Commons. The company will also provide community management resources to help OS-C establish the proper infrastructure and collaboration processes to effectively engage its growing membership.

Chris Wright, senior vice president and CTO, Red Hat
“Developing a common way to understand and model the impact a business has on the climate is the kind of challenging endeavor best suited to broad-scale industry collaboration. By bringing our technical and community expertise to OS-Climate, we’re able to help bring open, collaborative standards to bear to help tackle one of the world’s most critical issues.”

Truman Semans, executive director, OS-Climate
“Building an open source community to address a challenge as wide-ranging as climate change requires more than just code; it requires a holistic approach that starts from the foundation upwards. Red Hat is a proven leader in open source, both at a technological and cultural level, and we’re pleased to be able to lean on their vast experience in helping us craft a truly collaborative and impactful ecosystem around OS-Climate and the OS-Climate Data Commons.”

Rim Tehraoui, chief data officer, BNP Paribas Group
“Having a single global ecosystem where investors, companies, policy-makers and other actors can collaborate with the same data and analytics tools creates opportunities to drive much needed industry convergence and acceleration on climate-related analysis. It is extremely encouraging to have an actor such as Red Hat bringing its wealth of experience in open source technology to help us build a fully portable open climate data platform.”

Kara Mangone, global head of Climate Strategy, Goldman Sachs
“The importance of climate data and analytics for our firm and clients has continued to grow against the backdrop of an increasingly complex set of sources, approaches and tools. OS-Climate’s one-stop shop for essential information and collaborative analytics will enable clients and other stakeholders to more effectively measure progress and accelerate climate investment.”