SHADE Newsletter 10th July 2025

Welcome to the thirty ninth edition of the SHADE newsletter! 

SHADE is a research hub with a mission to explore issues at the intersection of digital technologies/AI, health and the environment. It is guided by a fundamental question: How should the balance between AI/digital enabled health and planetary health be struck in different areas of the world, and what should be the guiding principles?

The SHADE newsletter comes out every month, taking an in depth look at selected topics, as well as highlighting new resources, events and opportunities in the SHADE space.

In this newsletter we highlight tools, the perils of technocentric solutions and extreme heat. We conclude with a packed selection of opportunities and resources. We hope you enjoy it!

Please tell us what you like, what you don’t like and what you think is missing at [email protected].   

TOOLS

• SHADE’s own Green Digital Health Tool is in beta testing. Try it out and send feedback to [email protected].  

• Australia needs to consider environmental impacts in healthcare decisions and planning. This article highlights the publication of an Issues Brief, from the Deeble Institute for Health Policy Research, which explores relevant methodologies and frameworks for integrating environmental impacts into Health Technology Assessments (HTAs).

• Are you planning an AI healthcare intervention? The UK government’s AI Knowledge Hub has a growing list of public sector AI use cases you can learn from. These include case studies relating to transcription and note taking for social care workers, streamlining breast cancer screening and interpreting brain scans to improve outcomes for stroke patients.

• Correspondance in Nature outlines a new international partnership for governing generative artificial intelligence models in medicine. The article reviews conventional regulatory frameworks and highlights their deficiencies when it comes to GenAI and LLMs. It goes on to propose the Partnership for Oversight, Leadership, and Accountability in Regulating Intelligent Systems–Generative Models in Medicine (POLARIS-GM). This will ‘concentrate on the broader ecosystem of post-implementation controls, including scenario-specific and resource-dependent safeguards’. The authors welcome international healthcare stakeholders to join them in shaping the future of GenAI and LLM governance in healthcare.

• An aspirational approach to planetary futures: This Nature perspective moves away from goals, targets and boundaries to address planetary environmental challenges. It proposes instead a Nature Relationship Index - a sort of One Health take on the Human Development Index. The article explores possible indicators to compute the NRI and invites input on how to take it forward.

• This paper from the Journal of Environmental Management looks at how the integration between the digital and non digital sectors impacts carbon emissions, constructing a new framework for assessing this. ‘The findings have significant policy implications for both global and national economies striving to achieve low-carbon development’.

TECHNOCENTRIC SOLUTIONS

• Clinical knowledge in LLMs does not translate to human interactions. This study in Human-Computer Interaction found that standard benchmarks for medical knowledge and simulated patient interactions do not predict the failures found when human participants use LLMs for medical care. It calls for ‘systematic human user testing to evaluate interactive capabilities prior to public deployments in healthcare’.

• Two articles exposing the issues with purely technocentric approaches to AI and mental health: Firstly, Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers from Computer Science. Secondly Why human–AI relationships need socioaffective alignment from Humanities and Social Science Communications.

• Meanwhile, from Nature, Peers as humans in the loop in digital mental health, describes a trial that successfully marries the technical with the human.

• Finally, environmental considerations get a mention in Understanding the Impacts of Generative AI Use on Children from the Alan Turing Institute and Lego. Recommendations arising from this qualitative and quantitative research include ‘transparent reporting of environmental impacts to end users of the technology, using terms and metrics that children can understand’.

EXTREME HEAT

• As England braces for more heat, About 570 people in England and Wales are expected to die as a result of high temperatures from Thursday 19 June 2025 to Sunday 22 June 2025, a rapid study estimated. This study made the first real time use of a tool developed in 2024 by researchers Dr Malcolm Mistry and Professor Antonio Gasparrini.

• From Nature Geoscience, statistical analysis indicates an accelerating increase in the duration of heatwaves under global warming. Meanwhile data from 247 countries and 67 extreme heat events is analysed in a report from Climate Central, Climate Change and the Escalation of Global Extreme Heat. The report’s findings include that in 195 countries/ territories climate change at least doubled the number of extreme heat days in the year up to 1st May 2025. Finally analysis in PNAS illuminates the link between climate change and summer extreme weather events including heat domes. The article concludes that current climate models are likely under predicting the potential increase in such events.

• A recent study in Nature Communications, which followed more than 115,000 people for up to 2 years, indicates that rising temperatures may make the burden and prevalence of sleep apnea double by 2100.

Opportunities and Resources

• Do you have academic expertise in the effects of climate change on cancer? The Cancer Epidemiology Journal is seeking a special edition lead - someone with expertise in the topic who can convene a small group of collaborators and provide a one-page proposal. The journal is particularly interested in changing distributions of vectors and their effect on cancer causing pathogens, changes in endemic pathogens, lifestyles, population migration shifts and similar topics.  There is also interest in methodological outcomes and reports on national data and surveillance systems that endeavour to monitor such changes. All papers would proceed through regular peer review process. Ask questions and express interest by contacting Cancer Epidemiology journal Editor-in-Chief, Freddy Sitas of the International Centre for Future Health Systems at UNSW via [email protected].

• The Wellcome funded DHIS2 Climate and Health project has produced a report summarising its learnings and progress so far. Find the report and related content here. The project is looking for additional partners who can collaborate by contributing to the continued development of DHIS2 climate and health tools and helping bring them to scale in low- and middle-income countries. To discuss opportunities for collaboration, email the project at [email protected].

• As the Guardian reports on AI’s spiralling carbon emissions, two items link data centres and AI with their impacts on human health and the environment. Firstly, this commentary in Eco-Environment and Health calls for empirical research into global data center expansion and human health. Secondly, Sasha Luccioni and others call for a reversal in ‘the trend toward opacity in AI environmental reporting’ in Misinformation by Omission: The Need for More Environmental Transparency in AI. Following on from these comes Health Warning: The Human Cost of Climate Inaction with Julia Gillard. This episode of the Outrage and Optimism podcast looks into how centring the health impacts of climate change - lives lost rather than degrees gained - could drive faster and more inclusive climate action.

• Science reports on the Explosive mpox outbreak is Sierrra Leone. Nature also reports on the ‘skyrocketing’ outbreak. Meanwhile a Nature research briefing explains how viral genomes track the transmission of mpox in humans before the 2017 outbreak in Nigeria, and how the circulation and expansion prior to detection ‘underscores the urgency of strengthening the surveillance and diagnostic infrastructure’.

• Project Drawdown asks how Africa’s energy transition can be made fair. Highlighting that ‘Africa exists in a separate climate reality from that of the Global North’, the article notes how Africa’s energy transition is about much more than decarbonisation, with powering healthcare at stake. Noting the skewed nature of global finance it goes on to map out a solution.

• Three items relating to the UK NHS and its environmental impacts: First, the BBC reports on NHS plans to DNA test all babies to assess disease risk. There is, however, no mention of the environmental impact of doing this and how it fits with the NHS net zero goals, despite the rapidly increasing impact of AI in clinical genetics. Secondly, NHS England has published a case study into the environmental benefits of digital over paper, using Wayfinder, the NHS app service that enables patients to view and manage their referrals and appointments digitally. Finally, the Health Foundation asks Can an experiential future catalyse action on the NHS net zero goal?

• This paper from the Journal of Hazardous Materials Advances reviews the synergistic effects of climate change, co-pollutants, and microplastics in driving antibiotic resistance.

And finally, Inside the British lab growing a biological computer: The FT reports on the development of biological computers which will consume many orders of magnitude less energy than conventional electronics as they process information. Early benefits of the tech include facilitating ‘experiments on a little brain’..

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