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OpenEarth Foundation has joined the Linux Foundation’s open source collaboration, OS-Climate, to work together to further develop data commons that enable nested accounting of climate data and alignment with Paris Agreement goals.

The OpenClimate project aims to create an accounting system that provides the verifiability necessary to enable actions to limit global warming to 1.5 oC, as set out in the Paris Agreement. The nature of the Paris Agreement is that it is a bottom up, grassroots effort to tackle climate change. As with any grassroots effort, there is inevitable fragmentation in the emissions accounting. OpenClimate aims to establish data harmonization and digital interoperability among the currently fragmented national, subnational, city, sectoral, and even corporate data systems – that all nest neatly into an overall global emissions model. For this, OpenClimate leverages emerging technologies (such as blockchain, big data, and machine learning), and thus the partnership with OS-Climate is very fitting. OpenEarth actively currently leverages the power of verified credentials, decentralized digital identifiers and works with both Hyperledger and the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, which are initiatives from Linux. Through our partnership with OS-Climate and the Linux Foundation we foresee synergies and the potential
to further develop federated data commons with data verification —important for managing both privacy & transparency and also usability in regulation.

The first action that OpenClimate and OS-Climate will take together is to add subnational data harmonized by Data-Driven EnviroLab (DDL) and ClimActor into the OS-Climate data commons. Additionally, DDL, OpenEarth, and OS-Climate are working together to develop a federated node of the OS-Climate data commons with harmonized climate action targets from subnational actors.

“Radical collaboration is key to the mission of OpenEarth and this partnership with OS-Climate will help OpenClimate realize its goal of being a platform of platforms to provide climate data visibility. The convergence of OS-Climate’s finance oriented federated data commons with the datasets that OpenClimate leverages for decentralized, nested climate mitigation visibility will provide invaluable insights for the ratcheting up of climate ambition.” – Martin Wainstein, Executive Director of OpenEarth Foundation

“Overcoming the complex data and analytics barriers associated with climate emissions accounting is more than any one company or firm can achieve alone. We are thrilled that OpenEarth is leveraging OS-Climate’s Data Commons to jointly build the pre-competitive foundation of technology and data that the entire business and finance community needs” said Truman Semans, Executive Director of OS-Climate.

OpenEarth Foundation is a California-based nonprofit creating and deploying open source digital systems and solutions for a thriving planet. OpenEarth harnesses three core approaches to enhance planetary resilience: emerging digital technologies, collaboration and open platforms, and systems approaches. OpenClimate, one of OpenEarth’s programs, leverages the insights from the Climate Action Data (CAD) 2.0 community

Learn more about OpenClimate here.

Learn more about the CAD2.0 community here.

OS-Climate (OS-C) is an Open Source collaboration community which is building a data and software platform to dramatically boost global capital flows into climate change mitigation and resilience. Through a non-profit, non-competitive organization, the OS-C technology platform will accelerate development of analytic tools and manage data like code, bringing availability, reliability, quality, lineage, and comparability to climate-based financial data for every geography, sector, and asset class.

Learn more about OS-Climate here