Title

AWS re:Invent 2022 - Modeling climate change impacts and risks at scale (SUS210)

Summary

The session focused on the importance of understanding and modeling climate change impacts and risks for sustainability.
Max Richter and Pierre Souchet presented, discussing ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) data and its significance, particularly in the financial services industry.
They highlighted the challenges of adapting ESG data due to its unstructured nature, lack of reporting standards, and annual reporting frequency.
AWS solutions were presented as a means to overcome these challenges, with services like AWS Data Exchange, AWS Glue, Amazon S3, AWS Lake Formation, Amazon Athena, Amazon Redshift, Amazon Translate, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon SageMaker.
Pierre Souchet detailed how AXA Climate has built a solution on AWS to model climate risk at scale, emphasizing the importance of starting small, reusability, and security.
AXA Climate's solution uses a graph-based approach to manage data dependencies and automate computations, ensuring data security and lineage.
The session concluded with a call to explore other sustainability sessions and a request for attendees to rate the session.

ESG data is becoming increasingly important for risk management and investment decisions in the financial sector, with a growing demand for sustainable investment products.
The complexity of ESG data, due to its unstructured format and inconsistent reporting standards, poses a significant challenge for financial institutions.
AWS offers a comprehensive suite of services that can help organizations manage, process, and analyze ESG data, enabling them to build their own scoring models and gain insights.
AXA Climate's implementation of a data platform on AWS demonstrates a practical application of AWS services to address climate risk modeling. Their approach emphasizes scalability, security, and the ability to quickly adapt to new business requirements.
The use of graphs and colorized data lakes in AXA Climate's solution highlights innovative methods for managing complex data dependencies and ensuring data security.
The session underscores the importance of cross-sector collaboration and the role of technology in addressing climate change challenges.
AWS's commitment to sustainability is evident in their support for initiatives like the Climate Pledge and the Amazon Sustainability Data Initiative, which aim to facilitate access to key climate-related data sets.