The organization’s new Climate Finance Foundation will host an open source analytics platform to boost financing for climate solutions and aid decision makers.
The Linux Foundation (LF) announced Tuesday a new initiative to provide investors, banks, insurers, companies, governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and academia with an AI-enhanced open source analytics and open data platform. The plan is to boost financing for climate-related initiatives, address climate risks, and assess climate-related opportunities, the organization said.
Called the LF Climate Finance Foundation (LFCF), the goal is to asset owners, asset managers, and banks manage climate risk while identifying the climate-aligned companies, infrastructure, capital projects, and technologies that may thrive in a low-carbon economy. Allianz, Amazon, Microsoft, and S&P Global have committed to become founding members. The Climate Finance Foundation’s planning team includes representatives from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Ceres, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).
“There is a clear call from major pension funds, banks, governments and civil society for public access to corporate climate data and other data needed for finance to support [the 2015] Paris Climate Accord goals, as well as for better tools to inform financial decisions,” said Truman Semans, who helped lead the formation of the LFCF, in a statement.
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According to the LF, avoiding “catastrophic levels” of global warming will require at least $1.2 trillion more financing for climate solutions each year. Achieving this increase, requires better data and analytic tools to fully account for climate-related risk and opportunity. To facilitate this analysis, the LFCF is building the OS-Climate platform to explore different physical and economic scenarios.
Investors and banks are expected to use the platform to analyze portfolios and individual financings and investments. Governments could use it to make decisions regarding infrastructure investments and developing climate-related policy and regulations. Researchers are expected to use its open data to uncover insights for advancing scalable climate solutions, while investors and NGOs could use the platform to advocate more effectively for corporations to align with Paris Climate Accord goals.
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Development on the platform is underway. The Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTi) has released a beta version of its open source finance tool, developed jointly by OS-Climate and Ortec Finance, that will be integrated into the OS-Climate platform.
“The cost and complexity of analytics for climate-related investments require highly organized collaboration and resource sharing across hundreds of users and contributors,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, in a statement. “The LF Climate Finance Foundation will enable neutral governance, shared development costs, and technical leadership from many of the world’s leading financial institutions, multilateral organizations, academia, governments, and NGOs.”
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Source: TechRepublic
