Red Hat is now a member of OS-Climate (OS-C), a non-profit backed by the Linux Foundation building a data platform to help the financial industry integrate climate change into risk management and financial decision-making.

As part of its membership in the open source organization, Red Hat assembled a team of data engineers and solutions architects to develop the OS-C’s Data Commons, which will be a designated common space where pre-competitive geospatial, temperature, and other climate-related data will reside. 

Financial institutions that are existing members of OS-C will be able to analyze the available data to enhance risk modeling in the context of climate change, Kelly Switt, Red Hat’s senior director of financial services industry strategy, told SDxCentral in an interview.

The purpose of OS-C is to “understand both what's happening globally, but also how the different corporations that have a role to play within climate change [are] performing as an organization, and how that should impact the way that investors think about investing [or lending to] those companies,” she explained.

Switt hopes OS-C will influence government regulation and standardization of environmental metrics submitted by publicly-traded companies.

OS-C’s nature as an open-source organization is significant because it emphasizes collaboration in a space where competition is the standard. According to Switt, OS-C addresses “the altruistic need” for collaborative efforts to mitigate climate change.

“The concept of open source is not just about technology, but it's the way in which people work,” she said, adding that it’s also a door to bring a deeper sense of diversity to the project.

The open-source community is “about bringing different diverse backgrounds and opinions on specific matters together in order to create that level of collaboration that creates a unique outcome” that might be otherwise unattainable by collaborating within a single, less-diverse organization, Switt explained.