Linux Foundation Projects Unite at COP28 to Showcase Open Source Action on U.N. Sustainable Development Goals

Linux Foundation community to discuss impact of open source in a live stream presentation at COP28, Dubai.

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 28, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, is excited to announce a one-hour live-stream presentation at COP28, Dubai that will explore the transformative power of open source and how it is being used to advance the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Featuring speakers from Linux Foundation Research, Linux Foundation Europe, OS-Climate, Hyperledger Foundation, AgStack Foundation, Fintech in Open Source Foundation (FINOS), Sustainable & Scalable Infrastructure Alliance, and the ELISA and Zephyr projects, the presentation will take place on December 6th from 15:00 - 16:00 GST in the COP28 Blue Zone.

The Linux Foundation, home to more than 1,000 open source projects, aims to significantly scale up global, community-based open collaboration around solutions for climate change, sustainability, and environmental social governance (ESG). Presentation participants will call for the international community to broaden and deepen their open source efforts, with the aim to drive more resources toward developing the open source solutions needed to close the $5 trillion yearly gap in investment required for greenhouse gas mitigation, resilience, and adaptation.

The one-hour presentation on December 6th will include a series of talks about how Linux Foundation projects and communities are advancing the 17 UN SDGs. Sharing insights from the Linux Foundation's latest research, and important community projects and initiatives, speakers will highlight use cases and documented efforts that help drive sustainability, identifying where resources can be directed to broaden and deepen these efforts.

Two other events focusing on projects of OS-Climate will take place December 4th from 15:00 - 16:00 GST and December 5th from 16:30 - 17:30 GST. The first event will focus on open source analytic tools for Physical Risk and Resilience, led by BNP Paribas; Sector Alignment for Net Zero investing, led by Allianz; the OS-Climate Data Mesh supporting federated sourcing and access for data needed for climate alignment, led by Red Hat; and the launch of OS-Climate new open data offerings, Sovereign Bond Footprint Data based on Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials (PCAF) methodology, which will help realign to Paris Accord goals the $87 Trillion in sovereign bonds making up about 30% of all pension fund and insurance company investments globally. The second event will kick-off the global collaboration phase of the Transition Scenario Analysis initiative led by Capgemini to build the world’s most powerful modeling platform for climate transition decision making in business, finance, policy, and economic development. Further Information about the events can be found at https://os-climate.org/events/.

"I am thrilled to share new research at COP28 that illustrates the myriad Linux Foundation projects as transformative, digital public goods vital to the acceleration of the UN Sustainable Development Goals." - Hilary Carter, SVP Research & Communications, Linux Foundation Research

"OS-Climate has led the awakening of the sustainable finance and business community to the power of open source, and the public utility approach for data it debuted at COP26 is now being adopted across multiple initiatives including the NZDPU, the recently announced Monetary Authority of Singapore facility, and the utility for biodiversity envisioned by the Task Force for Nature-Related Financial Disclosures (TNFD). There is much greater potential to tap open source in accelerating climate impact. Most players in the climate community have yet to embrace true community-based development, where peers and even competitors work jointly to build the pre-competitive layers of data and tools in full transparency, which can be used in widely adopted commercial solutions and advisory services."  – Truman Semans, Executive Director of OS-Climate

"Climate Accounting is a global, decentralized problem that we all share. This is why the Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group is working hard to explore how to deliver open source, decentralized ledger solutions to provide a shared account of our global carbon emissions. Our work is a critical component of the development underway across the Hyperledger community to address climate challenges." – Sherwood Moore, Chair, Hyperledger Climate Action and Accounting Special Interest Group, Hyperledger Foundation

"More than 1/2 of the world's labor force is engaged in Agriculture. More than 70% of all freshwater is used in Agriculture. Our ways of producing, supplying/processing and consuming our food are simply not sustainable today and as a result 1/3rd of the total food produced is wasted and 1/3rd of the people on the planet are hungry - while 1/3rd of all GHG emissions on the planet come from agriculture. But agriculture can also be the solution - aided in part by the digital economy. With the help of its passionate community of public- and private-sector actors, AgStack is building an open-science, open-data and open-source data infrastructure - that enables digital content creation and consumption - at scale. For both industrialized farms in the global north and smallholder farms in the global south, AgStack offers a permissively licensed set of sub-projects that enable the reusable, inclusive and non-vendor-locked infrastructure (the digital "road") for digital applications (or "vehicles") to unleash the power of data to benefit food ecosystems stakeholders worldwide." – Sumer Johal, Executive Director, AgStack Foundation

"Not only does open collaboration deliver incredible efficiency in mutualizing resources needed to build the high quality and longevity software, hardware and standards our digital infrastructure runs on, but in turn enables these to be made available as digital public goods for the entire world to leverage. And when you pair this positive-sum game, in which individuals can collaborate on a level playing field with private and public sector actors, with worthy causes like the UN SDGs, the impact we can have is simply exponential and gives us a vital chance to address pressing issues that frankly no single entity can solve in isolation." – Gabriele Columbro, ED Fintech in Open Source Foundation, GM Linux Foundation Europe.

"The population is growing but our resources aren't. We need to be more efficient with what we have, which means we need to focus on advancing the UN Sustainable Development Goals, and open source is one of the best ways of collaborating on the infrastructure products are based on for dependability on a global scale. Zephyr is working towards efficient power management in resource-constrained applications, bringing AI to the edge, as well as being able to be secure and efficient when there are safety considerations. ELISA is working to enable Linux in similar embedded applications where there are safety considerations for market segments like automotive, medical, industrial, and aerospace." – Kate Stewart, VP Dependable Embedded Systems, Linux Foundation

"Digital infrastructure powers our communities and must also positively contribute to them. The scale at which this will expand requires those that are developing this infrastructure do so in a way that is not only profitable but sustainable, equitable and beneficial to the world. This philosophy is core to the Linux Foundation's Sustainable and Scalable Infrastructure Alliance. Our open community has developed specifications to address the very physical aspects of our digital infrastructure. The Open19 V2 specification addresses the emerging power and cooling requirements of next-generation workloads in a consistent, reusable form. We're excited to build on this momentum and work with the community on renewable energy (use, storage, and re-use), expand reuse of existing infrastructure, and create novel approaches to sustainability challenges in digital infrastructure." – My Truong, Chair, Sustainable & Scalable Infrastructure Alliance

The presentation will be hosted on December 6th in the COP28 Blue Zone from 15:00 - 16:00 GST. Participate in the free live-stream here. For more information about the Linux Foundation's sustainability efforts, visit LF Sustainability, and read the Open Source for Sustainability report.

About The Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is the world's leading home for collaboration on open source software, hardware, standards, and data. Linux Foundation projects are critical to the world's infrastructure including Linux, Kubernetes, Node.js, ONAP, PyTorch, RISC-V, SPDX, OpenChain, and more. The Linux Foundation focuses on leveraging best practices and addressing the needs of contributors, users, and solution providers to create sustainable models for open collaboration. For more information, please visit us at linuxfoundation.org. The Linux Foundation has registered trademarks and uses trademarks. For a list of trademarks of The Linux Foundation, please see its trademark usage page: www.linuxfoundation.org/trademark-usage. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.

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