Building data spaces for sustainability use cases

Malte Gasseling and Ramy Hcini (Think-it)

January 2024 (document history)

The primary objective of this strategy is to provide you with a clear starting point for how to design, operate, and maintain data spaces. The document explains the benefits and potential of data spaces, particularly in the context of environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) data exchange initiatives. It showcases the building blocks and provides information about how to join a data space. It also provides examples of options for building data spaces on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. This strategy document is substantiated by a technical pattern that combines concrete modules and materials with step-by-step technical guidance to make the strategy a reality.

Exchanging data through federated technology for environmental impact and beyond

Data spaces are federated networks for trusted data exchange, with control over one's data as a core principle. They enable organizations to share, exchange, and collaborate on data at scale by offering a cost-effective and technology-agnostic solution.

Data spaces have the potential to significantly drive efforts for a sustainable future by supporting empirical problem solving with an end-to-end approach that involves all relevant stakeholders. This can stimulate new ideas and the discovery of new opportunities through collaborative, data-driven innovation and help build the data value chain.

By breaking down data barriers and enabling diverse sources of data to be exchanged, your organization can tap into the combined knowledge of its peers, leading to new solutions and breakthroughs. Consequently, data spaces contribute to sustainability initiatives by enabling the sharing of ESG data at a large scale, promoting collaborative initiatives and industry standards. This is particularly pertinent in the context of evolving supply-chain due diligence and compliance requirements, including regulations such as the Non-Financial Reporting Directive (NFRD), the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD), and similar initiatives.

In addition, data spaces help you to make informed decisions that support sustainable development and reduce environmental impact. By creating trusted and accessible exchange networks for ESG data, data spaces can help your organization better track its progress towards sustainability targets, identify areas for improvement with a participatory perspective, and demonstrate compliance with regulatory requirements more efficiently.

In the context of this guide for decision makers and business executives, data spaces are one of the technologies to support the implementation of the recent political agreement reached by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union on the European Data Act. The European Data Act seeks to unlock industrial data, improve data accessibility, and foster a competitive European cloud market, ultimately promoting data-driven solutions and collaboration, in line with the broader data strategy for Europe. This aligns with the principles of data spaces in facilitating data exchange and collaboration for sustainable development, because both initiatives aim to empower organizations through data-driven solutions.

To learn more about the benefits of cloud technology for data spaces and the role of AWS, see the blog post Enabling data sharing through data spaces and AWS.