 All right, good afternoon. I am Michael Thiemann. I am the project lead from OS climate, and I'm also going to introduce our panelists today. I'm going to start with a little introduction. In the world of high tech, the question of the day is often, what is the next big thing? And then open source came along, and the question became, what's the next big thing in open source? I don't need to tell you that climate change is a big thing, and it's a big thing for people, for corporations, and for people who invest in corporations. It's the kind of problem made for a globally scalable innovation solution, such as open source. And this is what our panelists are going to talk about today. On our panel, we have Truman Siemens, the CEO of the OS climate project. We have Lisa Eichler, who is the co-head of Climate and ESG for Ortec Finance. We have Adrian Cockroft, the VP of cloud and architecture strategy for Amazon. And myself, Michael Thiemann, I am a project lead for OS climate, and I also work as a VP of open source affairs at Red Hat. And so let's start off with Truman telling us some of the key trends in how the world addresses climate and how that's driving fintech solutions. Great, thank you, Michael. And we appreciate the chance to be at this conference, and thank you for participating in the panel. So I'm looking at my window at the remains of Hurricane Eta. Michael and I are both in a state that is experiencing record rainfalls. Depending on where you all reside, very likely you've been impacted by one of the major events, fires, floods, hurricanes that is really shaping and reshaping the planet. You may also live in a place where the economic transition to a low carbon economy is having an impact, whether that's by changing prices and demand for fuels, etc. So a couple of the things that are really happening that bring this down to what's happening in open source and around fintech are that essentially what these transitions are happening, but climate risk, whether it's transition risk, transition to a new economy or physical risk, are not priced into markets. That's one of the reasons why climate change is at the top of the agenda for the incoming Biden administration. OS climate took part in the development of the first ever comprehensive guidance for all U.S. financial regulators released in September, calling for a mandatory price on carbon, and that's part of the Biden platform. Likewise in Europe, the main financial regulator is going to be promulgating new regulations coming out in March that call for the same thing. So what that means is that, and there's also requirements coming down from all the central banks requiring stress testing, requiring that financial institutions across the globe in 50 countries, and it was really ultimately spread to all countries, that financial institutions understand and report on the climate related systemic risk in their portfolios. So what does that mean? It means that essentially almost every large corporation and large financial services player that is participating in this conference has got to act. That's the demand side, and we'll talk more about the supply side, the solution later on in the talk. All right, thank you. Thank you for setting the stage. Let's understand what is the OS climate platform and what's the vision? So today, where we stand and sit, there is a gap of literally 1.2, at least 1.2 trillion dollars a year in an unmet finance and investment that would be required to meet the goals of the Paris Climate Accords and therefore to avoid really catastrophic disruption of the economy, society, and the environment. There are large investors, institutional investors with 40 trillion under assets who have said, we're going to respond, but they haven't yet because except really around the margins because they lack the necessary data and tools and analytic tools to integrate climate related risk and opportunity into a whole range of investment decisions. The same is true in corporations. And so OS climate has a vision of developing the data commons and the required data, quality, trusted, comparable data about corporations, about markets, about the physical world, combined with a platform of open analytic tools that is able to run a whole range of scenario based analysis, drawing from science, but applying these to concrete decisions in the capital markets. So Lisa Eichler, based on your experience with institutional investors and financial institutions, what do they need in an open source platform like this? Yes, thank you, Michael. So maybe just to give the audience a bit of a view of what our experience there has been. So Ortec Finance, we're really kind of a FinTech specialized in modeling and building technology for the financial sector. So for these institutional investors, including insurance, big insurance companies, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and so on. And traditionally, they have been using these financial decision making tools without the climate angle in it. But about three, four years ago, there was really this up kick and trend in investors wanting to find out how can they integrate climate risk and broader also climate alignment thinking into these tools. And yeah, that's what we have focused on. And we really see that investors really struggle with this same common question on figuring out the available standards, but also the available data and tooling around the topic of climate change. And we also see that at the same time, our collaborators in this field in terms of service providers, data provider scientists, but also competitors the same. We're all racing as fast as possible to work on filling these current gaps. But what we feel very strongly about as Ortec Finance is that to get these basics in place, it could very much be accelerated if everyone worked together towards that one common goal. So joining forces in terms of the hours invested, the innovation budgets spent, because in the end, we're trying to, like you already said in the introduction, we're trying to tackle one common challenge that the world is facing. And we only have about 10 years left to act to give the future world a chance and succeed in the transition to a low carbon economy. So for that to build this common base layer and really have a unified platform that can provide open data, open tools, so that all the analytics around climate change can become more comparable, consistent and transparent. I think that's really a common trend that we see from the investor's perspective. Truman, did I see you wanted to add something to that? I could, but perhaps this is a good point for Lisa to talk about the net zero. Actually, I'll tell you what, I'll do this and Lisa, I'll kind of tee you up here. So the initial members of OS climate under the Linux Foundation are Allianz, which combined with its investment management subsidiaries manages several trillion dollars in assets, not just the insurance company, but also a major, major asset manager, Amazon, Microsoft and S&P Global, one of the leading market data and analytics providers. One of the reasons why Allianz is involved and they are a longtime client by the way of Ortec Finance is because of a thing called the net zero asset owner alliance. So I referred to some of these major commitments that are drawing a demand for better data and analytics. And Lisa, why don't you say just a word about the net zero asset owner alliance? Yeah, I think the net zero asset owner alliance just like actually various other initiatives that are kind of investor driven initiatives. They're really looking for, yeah, like what I said, kind of a unified approach. And they would like to accelerate the building of more openly available data sets as well as tools for analytics and together. So not choosing across different types of commercial data sets necessarily, but really finding a solution that is comparable and very transparent. And they are really involved in driving, yeah, this also the OS climate initiative and supporting where they can. I'm just going to mention, so these are not small institutions, Aviva, AXA, CalPERS, the largest asset owners in the US. Just a depot in France, CDBQ, let's see, Generale, Munich, Switzerland, Nordea, so Zurich, so some of the very largest financial institutions on the planet. And not only have they committed to net zero emissions in their investment portfolios by 2050, but they've each also made commitments by 2025 for very substantial reductions, but they don't know how to get there. They're taking a major risk and there's a need for speed. So that's one of the reasons why they're turning to open source to meet those needs. Yeah, that's absolutely a great point. Figuring out how to navigate the financial movements to get there is really a super big challenge and one of the things that the OS climate platform is being positioned to answer. And I've actually been leading the Alpha prototype efforts among some of the initial OS climate members. But first, Lisa and Adrian, could you say a few words about the work that has been done and is underway so far? Lisa, why don't you talk a little bit about the SBTI tool? Yeah, so as an OSC, we were tasked to build actually the science-based targets initiative. It's a large initiative. Once again, many investors, many stakeholders involved and they have developed a very credible methodology for measuring actually temperature scoring and portfolio alignment to a transition to any kind of carbon reduction targets, right? And they were looking for somebody to build an open source tool that can be the calculation engine, so to say, to put this methodology into practice so that investors as well as companies can start measuring their temperature score and portfolio coverage. And so over the last few months, we have been hard at work building this open source Python code, which is really aimed to be able to integrate it in any commercial or homegrown decision support tooling or also run as a standalone version. And it has been launched early October as an open source tool, like we've been mentioning. And currently, we're now working on further building on top of that with the OS climate community and yeah, further expanding its functionality over time. Adrian? Yeah, sure. So AWS has been supporting open data for a long time. We've had that program for many years. And in 2018, we announced the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative. Since then, it's grown to about 20 petabytes of basically climate data, the data you need to build these kinds of tools. So that was our starting point. And what we're doing now is we're taking, we're looking at the data we've got, we're looking at the additional data that's needed to support these tools and the entire program. We're adding new things to ASDI, new data sources. And with ASDI, it makes sure that the data is clean. It's got somebody who's going to keep it up to date. And we host it for free on AWS. So that's, that's kind of the bottom up approach. Then we're also working top down with Allianz, particularly to define how they want to use this, what are the different sort of flows, what are the different user needs that we can induce cases that we want to build. And then in the middle, we've got we're integrating things like SBTI and other contributed analytics packages that are doing things like physical risk. And that can drive investment in resilience to heat, coast and river flooding, drought, things like that. And we're pulling all this together with a data catalog interface. And the team that's doing this, we've contributed some AWS credits to OS climate to run this themselves, but also we've contributed a professional services team, which has a great deal of experience in building data, data lakes, data warehousing. And so that team is basically kickstarting the, the open source contribution to get it, get the thing initially in place. Thank you. In addition, Allianz and Microsoft have been working on building some stress testing tools for climate risk management by insurance companies and banks. And we've been looking at the work, for example, that the Bank of England has put out there on the Prudential 2019 insurance model, the BES 2021 model. And all of this is, is coming together in a context at the Linux Foundation, which obviously supports many other cross industry open source collaborations, such as FinOS, LFAI, LF Energy, Automotive Grade Linux, and other umbrella projects related to open, open climate and ESG data. But I'd like to ask, Adrian, what was it that really brought you and Amazon into OS climate? Well, I've been personally interested in sustainability for many years. And most recently, I've been working on open source for AWS. So this is a kind of a natural bridge for me. But what really happened a little over a year ago, Jeff Bezos made the climate pledge for Amazon as a whole, obviously, including AWS to meet the Paris Accord 10 years early, and to move Amazon itself, all of our energy used to be renewable by 2025. And what that really did internally, we were already investing in sustainability in several areas, but it really stepped up the level of investment. So internally, we've been working through, what does it mean to have this as a priority for Amazon to take a leadership position on climate rather than sort of working through what we needed to, to just keep to sort of be in the middle of the pack. So that's what's really changed. We're also seeing a growing demand for companies to make sustainability a focus and disclose their climate related risk. As I mentioned, we had the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative since 2018, and creating and hosting a data commons and open source analytics on top of that, open source data is freely supported and data is an obvious next step. And it's just, like I said, we've contributed credits and a team and we're sort of well underway now in figuring out what it takes to put all these pieces together. One of the great things about open source is the way that it enables companies that are normally fierce competitors to find new grounds on which to collaborate. And with Amazon and Microsoft, both part of the OS climate project, I'd like to get your perspective on how is it working for Amazon and Microsoft to be playing in this sandbox together? I think it's really the same as we have with open source. There's plenty of projects where AWS and Microsoft cooperate to build open source projects together. So it's really the outcome here is a common goal, it's a common good. Anything that we do helps the world, anything that Microsoft do helps the world, and it applies in the same way. So it's sort of a positive sum game, if you like. And the more people we can get involved in OS climate, the better. What we're really seeing, though, is that the current climate modeling marketplace is fractured. We need to move to an open source data and analytics model. We can take out this undifferentiated listing that everyone's doing over and over again, standardize the data commons and create a larger, more unified marketplace for climate impact modeling. And that's really the goal here. And then really the leading analytics today, the capabilities we have are based on open source tooling and common standards. And AWS has services to make those easy to use. But it also gives customers the option to run those tools. There are implementations elsewhere. So we're assembling the contributions on GitHub. We're extending ASDI to include these additional data sources. And we see a few different ways that people are going to be using this. The idea here is to have a multi-tenant service operated by OS climate. You can go to explore the data for free up to obviously some limits. But so basically for people to explore it and figure out what's there. And then we expect a commercial analytics marketplace to emerge for enhanced data and analytics on top of that. That's where we'll start. The second thing, larger organizations are going to want to run their own private copy of this. But since it's potentially petabytes of data, the sort of easiest thing to do is to just take the open source set up, run it in their own AWS account against ASDI data sources. And that's a low-cost way that they can have their own version of this whole thing and build their own analytics on top of that. Then the third approach is to have a private copy of the data and the code running at a data center or on another cloud provider. And obviously the configuration tooling around that will be slightly different. But that we expect to have contributed into the project as well. So the core analytics will be purely open source and based on open source toolkits and will be basically cloud neutral and agnostic. Sorry about that. Thank you. Thank you so much. I noticed that we have not gotten a lot of questions in the chat, which may mean that we are so engaging that you can't get to your keyboard. But if you do have questions you want answered later down the road, feel free to push them into the chat channel or the Slack channels and we'll get back to you. But in the meantime, there are a lot of climate data and analytics initiatives happening. And so I'd like to ask Truman to talk a little bit about what is it that differentiates OS climate? What are the other important open source efforts that our audience should know about? So actually, I want to ask Michael, if you might yourself tackle one of the key first pieces of this. So I'll talk about some of the other open source initiatives. But there are a number of initiatives out there that are open this, open that, that say we have made our product and code open source, but they're not. So if you want to comment on that. Sure. So as many of you may know from my bio, I've been doing open source legitimately since before open source existed as a term, starting that world's first company back in 1989. But during that long history, there are people who have observed that using the word open has magical marketing properties and the open source initiative as an organization has done its best to make open source licensing really mean something. The Linux Foundation has done a phenomenal job of basically being an honest broker who can bring a number of competing companies together and to work successfully at collaborative development and industry wide initiatives. Now, at the same time, there continue to be companies and investors who are looking for how to bring that open magic sauce to their play without necessarily contributing back or allowing for the kind of creative competition that true open source and open data allow. But this is something which the real open source community knows how to do. And we're doing it within the umbrella of the Linux Foundation. Great. Thanks. So let me, there are a number of different initiatives and companies we wanted to make sure the audience is aware of. This is not comprehensive, but you know, hopefully we'll point you in some other directions and, you know, in maybe in the networking room after the sessions over, we can point you to others. So there are a lot of initiatives and that are focused on more efficient trustworthy carbon markets, which are going to be crucial for addressing the low carbon transition in an economically efficient way. And then there are others that are focused on specific asset classes. So the Open Climate Foundation is one that's an example of work around carbon markets. And by the way, they're tied in with Hyperledger within the Linux Foundation family. One that's working on particular asset classes that we're excited about is called Capital for Climate. And that is really much more about as large financial institutions and social investors come to understand how they need to reallocate, strategically reallocate their portfolios. This is about deploying capital, particularly into next generation technologies, private equity, venture stage firms. So there are also some really very important open source initiatives and open data initiatives around physical risk. One that is sort of a bridge and servicing the insurance community, but also all of those, all of us, because we're all insured in multiple different ways, is called OASIS. They're exceptional. There are some great efforts underway to, and we'll talk a little bit more in a minute or two, about addressing the impacts of climate change on the natural world, biodiversity, and the natural world that we depend on. There's some great things going on on that front in Brazil. So one is called Mapilmash, and then Política, Polar, and Tarot backed, those are backed by the way, by Itaú, which is the largest commercial bank in all of Latin America. And that will be implemented across the various banking platforms in the years ahead. So also a really interesting area that I think touches a lot of areas of FinTech and open source is around asset level data. So alternative information on what companies are really doing when it comes to energy, emissions, water, and that involves, for example, the use of AI, also spatial data, and there's some great organizations working on that, including Geo Asset in the United Kingdom, part of Oxford, or related to Oxford, and ADEM, which is a major quasi-governmental think tank in France. Maybe, Lisa, do you have any thoughts there? Yeah, so maybe just to add to those broader initiatives that Truman mentioned, also to say that there are also various very interesting and ambitious startups such as rights based on science, who open source at least big large parts of their initiatives, their data, or analytics tooling. And in addition to that, I also would like to mention that, of course, the large universities, the very established climate science modelers, these data sets are also open source and certainly something that encourages collaboration also with OSC and feeding from the academic open source available data sources as well. Yeah, Adrienne, you might have some thoughts on that as well, given your work in sustainability over the years. Yeah, and I've also spent a lot of time working with finance companies of various types around the world. And I think the trend that I'm seeing is the need for speed. They're seeing business agility as a survival characteristic. And I think we'll see that move from basically the organizations that have figured out how to build products quickly and adopt new technologies quickly that have got into open source and DevOps and all of the kind of containers, AI, machine learning, the people that have figured out how to adopt those technologies are also the organizations that I think are going to figure out how they're going to be in the vanguard of thinking about sustainability and climate mitigation practices. And I think that the organizations that get left behind are the ones which are at risk from the commercial point of view. And what we'll start to see is that if you're falling behind here, you're actually going to start getting your value marked down as an asset risk. So I think that that's driving people in everyone in the right direction. But I think that certainly the leading companies are the ones that have already figured out how to be more agile and how to respond more quickly. That's awesome. I want to just notice right now how much of a there there already is there. When I started promoting this idea of commercial support for free software, it was almost impossible to get people excited about it only because it was so new and there were so few other people doing it, let alone consuming it. And we've heard about all these banks, we've heard about how many startups and how many governmental organizations and policies are all converging on this common topic. And so the opportunity to join in and start addressing the climate change world within the financial services community is just awesome. But it gets even better because there are open data and open fintech solutions being developed that go beyond just the climate. And so Lisa, can you talk a little bit about the world of ESG? Yeah, sure. I mean, of course, indeed, there is the broader world of ESG and, you know, sustainability indicators. So I would say climate is maybe the most concrete and the most data rich topic to start with. But I would say by no means is that the only one to focus on so broader, we also see huge needs in the market for more unified and more transparent open data on broader ESG. But I would say also, what our team is also really looking into is actually expanding from climate to all the planetary boundaries eventually, and I mean, including, for example, you know, what Truman was mentioning, biodiversity and maybe also, you know, connecting the dots. So working on the just transition so that connects the E and the S to me and the ESG. So also making sure that there's social inclusion in the transition towards a low carbon climate resilient economy. So I want to say a little bit more about the biodiversity side. So this is so when you talk about sort of next big thing in terms of sort of what's happening in the climate world. So that it is it's very, very much increasingly focused on not just mitigating greenhouse gases and but on addressing the catastrophic loss and threat of even accelerated losses of biodiversity and the habitat that biodiversity depends on. This is going to be a very big thing that affects a whole range of industries and markets and certainly around FinTech. So it is it is the top item on the sort of environment agenda for the European Union or we sort of those climate and biodiversity and that's going to even increase and appear in a whole range of different regulations that are going to create need for additional FinTech, RegTech, etc. Because the French are about to take over the presidency of the European Union and it is their top priority. Fortunately, the senior advisor to the French government on these issues is also on our advisory board. So expect to be closely involved there. That's Monique Barbu. Fantastic, fantastic. So you know as if as if just the financial climate informed investment opportunity wasn't big enough. The social dimension, the governance dimension, the biodiversity dimension, there's a lot to it. But as Truman said, this really is all about science coming together to be able to help us better understand our financial decisions, our priorities, and that is why it is so important for us to have a framework that can become a unified framework. And so that is Michael to a question that came in earlier because I think actually this is a good point to address it and that is sort of how does what we're talking about here connect to other areas of FinTech. And so I'll give you one example that is just hugely exciting and important. So mobile payments is obviously a massive area of work and where there's just been tremendous leapfrogging of traditional banking models to be able to address bottom of the pyramid to be able to handle financial transactions in remote areas all over the world. And a lot of that has been driven and enabled by improvements in infrastructure and networking, etc., including through projects of LF networking and others. So what does that have to do with what we're talking about here? So it is crucially important to be able to have actually micro payments that flow down to rural farmers in Africa to to people that are using low carbon high efficiency cook stoves as an alternative to basically cooking and heating with with dung for fuel. Those are all things that we're through mobile telephony and micro payments working through the telecom system are able to engage and involve those people in a way that not only when you add it up across the billions of people that that are users of energy, tillers of soil, etc., not only are changes in motivating those changes important for addressing climate change, but also for a just transition. Yeah, that's great. And so I think another another question which is on a lot of people's mind is how can they themselves get involved? How can individuals, not just organizations get involved? And Adrian, why don't you talk a little bit about that? Sure. Yeah. I mean, we've had obviously in the open source arena, it's a mixture of corporate contributions and individuals who get excited about a particular area. One of the ways that we've seen that works pretty well to get people excited is to organize actually have an organized hackathon. And that way you can you have sort of the core support people in place that know how the system is currently built can see have some sort of concentrated support and just invite people in and have everybody just working on different aspects of the system. So we have we've been organizing hackathons around projects for a long time, all different kinds of things. And so I think that's something that we're looking to do as as this gets to a point where there's a publicly available copy of the code. We're looking to try to organize various types of events around it to sort of promote it and gather people get people to make contributions and figure out how to use the data themselves. Hackathons can be an amazing catalyst. Another suggestion. Lisa Eichler posted a link to the science based targets initiative tool, which is just you know, it's just one piece of this massive, massive puzzle. And I don't recommend trying to consume all knowledge about global climate change and climate aware investing in one go. But if you wanted to start somewhere and just sort of look at how a particular piece reaches into some of the topics that would be a good way to also get involved. So we are in the process of building some prototypes. We are not quite yet ready to release that code because we wanted to be something that people can sort of latch on to and study and we're still really at the beginning. But as we make announcements about the prototype availability, we hope that the awareness that we are building through activities like this forum are going to cue people to look at that work, make comments, criticize, possibly join, that's what that's really what the open source community is all about. So I want to know if let's see I'd like we just have a few minutes left and so I'd like to go back to Truman Siemens and just give us a recap of the near term vision of OS climate. Great. So thank you. And again, we're very pleased to have the opportunity to have spoken with you all today. We are very eager for you to get involved in the work that we're doing, whether through membership in OS climate and contributions on a corporate level, or as individual contributors. And as we've said, we will certainly push out through the community opportunities for individual developers to do that. We hope to get to that point soon. So I think what we've sort of mentioned in bits and pieces here, some elements of their vision for the data commons and for analytics. So just to kind of put that to wrap that together, we're focused in the near term on the greatest needs, the most pressing needs of large sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, asset managers and banks for understanding and quantifying climate related risk, understanding and actively investing in opportunities for climate solutions that also have the risk return profile that is required or providing sort of having better credit decisions for what they finance. And for at a more of a financial system level to provide the tools that are needed to understand climate related risk across the financial system. So that's the envelope for the the elements and pieces that you've heard described here today around tools for stress testing around the science based targets financial initiative tool, tools for assessing portfolios of real assets and other types of portfolios for physical risk and resilience and adaptation and investments in resilience. And then very, very importantly, accelerating toward the availability of high quality comparable data about markets and corporations that is robust enough to essentially to serve all of these investment needs. We're taking small steps now toward that. Maybe Adrian, you can talk about just some of the immediate steps that are underway. So we're currently working a way to get this put together. The first version, we've got some internal prototypes that we'll be sharing amongst the OS climate membership as we as we go forward, we're starting to assemble the pieces, some of the contributions, but we're expecting to have have something in the next few months that's actually starts to become usable and then have a public release sometime during 2021. So that's the schedule we're on. And I think just going back to the what can you do thing, I think everybody that works for a public company, you should know what your public company's position is on disclosing your targets. And if you don't know what that is, if your company doesn't have a position, maybe that you can go and ask the question back quick. What are we doing if climate reporting, climate impact reporting becomes mandatory for all public companies around the world? What is our position on that? And I think that's a good question and you may find that somebody's working on it, that you can develop that relationship and then maybe point them at OS climate as a way to help build that reporting information. Adrian, I think that's such an excellent closing argument that idea of answering the question, what can I do? Perhaps the reason that climate change has become such a large problem is that individuals think about that question and they can't imagine that practically there is anything that they can do. And yet, and yet this open source development model, this marketplace of companies who desperately need breakthrough technologies to be able to make correct decisions, set the stage for that individual contributor to work with the many, many other individual contributors who have the same question, who have an answer, a piece of the answer to this question. And so time is short, but time is now for those who have that question, what can I do to find an answer and within their companies bring their companies to the table at as part of the Linux Foundation's climate finance group. For those of you who are true individual contributors, check in with the OS climate project and see when we are ready to engage the open source community more fully. We're at time, but Truman, if you want to have the last word since it's your project go right ahead. No, that was a perfect closer. Go ahead. Well, we really, really appreciate your time and attention. I see that there's a couple of late, late breaking comments in the chat, but we can continue this conversation on the Slack channel. We can continue this conversation out there in the real world. And so thank you so much for giving us your attention and we hope to see you somewhere in the code space sometime soon. Thank you. And thank you, Lisa, Truman, Adrienne, you've been fantastic. Thank you.