For those who missed it, I am delighted to share the news that on July 1st, OS-Climate merged with FINOS, a sister umbrella project in the Linux Foundation (LF). The Linux Foundation is the largest & most effective coordinator of member organization collaborations to jointly build pre-competitive layers of open source software & data that can be freely incorporated by any party into proprietary or commercial solutions. The LF has more than 1000 technical projects, to which more than 540,000 individual developers have contributed.
FINOS provides an independent setting to develop open source software, open data, & open standards to address common industry challenges in financial services. It has 90+ members in banking, asset management, insurance, financial data & services, consulting, & tech, including 10 global banks & asset managers with more than $10 trillion in assets under management.
Climate data challenges are growing ever more complex, creating a major barrier to closing the annual $7 trillion gap in finance & investing needed to reach Paris goals. ESG data flows across many institutions, from corporate disclosure, to non-profits organizations, to data-vendors, to financial institutions, to regulators. The growing number of regulatory & voluntary reporting standard entails varying measures, units, metadata around sources & data quality, international variations of rules & trigger levels, etc.
The FINOS community has successfully tackled similar problems before for derivative trade reporting. Its Common Domain Model (CDM) could become part of the backbone for climate data sharing in corporate & financial services sectors, & for global carbon & biodiversity markets. CDM is used many of International Capital Market Association (ICMA)’s 620+ members in international debt capital markets in 68 jurisdictions globally. Its members include private & public sector issuers, banks & securities dealers, asset & fund managers, insurance companies, & central banks. It is also used by many of the International Swaps & Derivatives Association’s (ISDA) 1,000 member institutions.
Compared to commercial solutions, open source data “products” analytics required to derive actionable climate data are more trustworthy because of transparency, more quickly updated to account for changing standards & methodologies, more secure, & lower cost.
The merger will dramatically increase OS-Climate’s ability both to drive impact in addressing climate change & biodiversity loss, & to help our members address a wide range of business challenges in risk management, regulatory compliance, & finance & investment in transition opportunities.
For information about membership, please contact us at [email protected]. For information on collaborating in projects, find information here. We encourage developers & data scientists to begin by joining the regularly scheduled meetings of projects that interest them.
Best regards,
Truman Semans
Founder & CEO
