Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has joined OS-Climate, 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 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 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 the 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, the Open Container Initiative and many more. Beyond the technical skill to actively contribute code to these initiatives, Red Hat also provides a 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.
