Amazon and Microsoft are two of the founding members of the Linux Foundation’s latest initiative, which taps open source data and analytics to tackle climate risk.

The initiative is called the LF Climate Finance Foundation, and its members are building an open source platform to help investors, banks, governments, and other organizations use artificial-intelligence (AI) based analytics and data to make better climate-related investments.

In addition to Amazon and Microsoft, Allianz and S&P Global are also founding members. Plus, the Climate Finance Foundation’s planning team includes representatives from leading sustainable-investment, non-governmental organizations (NGO) such as the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Ceres, and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB).

“And the reason why this is so important, and so urgent, is that there is at least a $1.2 trillion annual gap in the amount of finance that’s flowing to transitioning to a low-carbon and resilient economy and addressing the needs of vulnerable communities,” said Linux Foundation Acting Executive Director Truman Semans.

Semans is referencing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warning that avoiding catastrophic levels of climate change will require at least $1.2 trillion more financing each year. But meeting this increase in investment requires better data and analytics tools, he added.

And so, after two years consulting with leading data scientists including IBM President Jim Whitehurst and sustainable investment experts, “we came up with the confirmation that the community-based, open source approach is a great fit,” Semans said.

To help with this, the LFCF is building the OS-Climate platform so banks and fund managers can improve climate risk management and identify companies, infrastructure, capital projects, and technologies that will advance a low-carbon economy.

“We aim to be a force multiplier, and to be able to speed up and scale a whole range of different solutions built on top of the stack,” Semans said.

The Science-Based Targets Initiative’s open source Finance Tool is one of these solutions. The group released the beta version last month, and the LFCF plans to integrate the Finance Tool into the OS-Climate platform and further build out this tool.

Additionally, an open Data Commons is another planned piece of the OS-Climate platform. Amazon is the lead technical partner for this project, and Semans said the group will share more details about it in the next few weeks.

“And then we’ve also gotten contributions of IP — very robust IP — that’s in use by institutional investors for other key components of the kernel: top-down, scenario-based modeling that is used for a range of different analysis of risk and opportunity in investment portfolios. Bottom-up, scenario-based analysis that’s used for understanding the risk and opportunity around companies. And then a global data set of the probabilities and severity of different kinds of physical perils like flood, heat, fire, drought, etcetera,” he added.

In addition to serving as a technical lead for the Data Commons prototype, Amazon will contribute cloud resources and “the many petabytes of climate-relevant data we are making available through the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative to push this project forward,” Kara Hurst, VP of worldwide sustainability at Amazon, said in a statement.

Last year Amazon co-founded and signed the Climate Pledge, which is a commitment to be net zero carbon 10 years ahead of the Paris Agreement. “We believe that more climate risk data and information will support signatories of this pledge and others in achieving the goal of becoming carbon neutral, and, at the same time, climate resilient," Hurst said.

Microsoft, a co-founder and signatory of the Transform to Net Zero initiative, will contribute sustainability data to advance the financial modeling and understanding of climate-change impact, said Jennifer Yokoyama, Microsoft chief IP counsel, in a statement. Earlier this year Microsoft developed a Sustainability Calculator to help its customers track carbon emissions data associated with their Azure cloud usage.

“Addressing climate issues in a meaningful way requires people and organizations to have access to data to better understand the impact of their actions,” Yokoyama said.

Different organizations will be able to use the OS-Climate Platform in unique ways, Semans explained. For example, investors and banks could use it to analyze portfolios and individual financing and investments. Governments could use it to invest in resilient infrastructure, develop policy, and enable regulators to manage market-related climate risk. Additionally, investors and NGOs could use the platform to encourage corporations to align with Paris Accord climate goals.

Tech companies can also use data and AI-based analytics to help develop products and services that help their customers reduce climate impact, Semans said.

“There is so much untapped potential for companies and individuals in the tech sector to have a massive positive impact in addressing climate change, and the community that we’re establishing is very much about providing an important new avenue to do that,” he said. Plus, the Linux Foundation’s neutral “Switzerland-like environment” allows “competing providers to find common ground and share the cost, and IP, and effort required to build a shared technology.”