SHADE Newsletter 11th January 2024

Welcome to the latest 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 two weeks, bringing you a selection of the latest news, upcoming events, academic publications and podcasts in the SHADE space.

We have something for everyone in this first edition of 2024. We are highlighting tools - tools in practice, tools in development and proposed tools. The selection illustrates different perspectives on how to tackle the environmental impacts of digital technologies and AI, as well as the different scenarios tools are designed for. We also look at the latest on chips and mining, hear from Big Tech and Big Pharma, delve into dark data, bring back blockchain and much, much more.

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].    

Highlight on Tools

• Check out the Data Carbon Ladder from Loughborough University - and learn about Dark Data (more on this in “what we’re reading” below).

• Interested in a central repository of environmental assessments of health systems, hospitals, surgical procedures, medical equipment and pharmaceuticals from around the world? Check out the HealthcareLCA database.

• The Green Software Foundation (GSF) are powering ahead with their Impact Framework (IF) tool: The vision for this is comprehensive and consistent measurement of the environmental impact of software - whether carbon emissions, water or land usage or other chemical impacts. Asim Hussain from the GSF talks us through IF, which is currently in development, and the upcoming hackathon to take it forward. Asim talks about the hackathon first (the dates have changed!), and IF itself about 12 minutes in. He touches on IF’s timeline (version 1.0 by COP29), and his hopes for the transparency it will bring, about 1 hour in. There’s more on the hackathon in “Events” below - you don’t have to be technical to take part.

• Soumyendu Sarkar from Hewlett Packard presents a paper on the Data Centre Carbon Footprint Reduction (DC-CFR) framework that won best ML innovation at Climate Change AI’s “Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning” workshop at NeurIPS 2023.

• A paper presented at the October 2023 Related Systems Thinking and Design Symposium (RSD12) brings another perspective on tools. It highlights the limitations of ICT carbon calculators and explores a systemic design inspired responsible innovation framework for addressing ICT carbon emissions.

News

• As 2023 is confirmed as the hottest year on record, and the scale by which records were broken in the latter half of the year raises big questions for scientists, it’s all systems go for AI in healthcare, with Google Cloud in pole position.

• Meanwhile the Nvidia chips behind the AI boom are set to consume more electricity than entire countries by the end of this year. If their projected sales go through, this will almost triple in the following year.

• The mining industry is also turbo charged by demand for AI and digitalisation: Nature reveal the chronic lack of data on the impacts of mining and set out what has to happen to improve the situation. There is one piece of potential good news on the mining front, which AI has expedited, with the discovery of a possible alternative to lithium.

• AstraZeneca highlight what they are doing to reduce the environmental impact of clinical trials.

• During COP28 the Arab News reported that Saudi Arabia was set to lead a global drive for digital sustainability with a new e-waste initiative aimed at implementing comprehensive regulations in Zambia, Rwanda and Paraguay.

What we’re listening to

• Asim Hussain, this time with his Intel hat on, features in this MIT Technology Business Lab podcast on Developing climate solutions with green software. 

• Two podcasts from GSF’s Environment Variables series: The first is a recap on GSF’s Decarbonise Software 2023. The second explores what Google are doing on the sustainability front and the tools they offer Google Cloud users - including Region Picker, Active Assist and Carbon Footprint.

What we’re reading

• Blockchain technologies have historically been viewed as bad for the environment, on account of the massive energy consumption associated with Bitcoin mining. Unpacking blockchain shows the limitations of this view, and decentralised power distribution networks with multiple interoperable microgrids provide an example of the application of blockchain and how this can bring benefits in carbon footprint monitoring and reduction. Blockchain’s capabilities for addressing planetary health are explored in this scoping review which highlights the shared values inherent in blockchain and planetary health.

• Nature does a roundup of the good and bad of ChatGPT as it includes it in its list of ‘people’ shaping science in 2023. The article notes its “large environmental impact”.

• The Journal of Medical Internet Research undertakes a systematic literature review of The Role of Virtual Consulting in Developing Environmentally Sustainable Health Care.

• A contribution to the evidence base on the carbon emissions impact of a satellite centre for radiotherapy.

• Dark data - environmental disaster or untapped asset? Perspectives from the data centres, businesses generating the data and academia.

• Carbon awareness means doing more when the available electricity is generated from renewables and less when it isn’t. This paper looks at using this technique in training large language models.

   

Events

• Participate in Carbon Hack 2024, which has GSF’s Impact framework at its core.

• Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) Europe’s annual conference on sustainable healthcare, happens online June 3rd to 7th 

Opportunities (and add in subscription text)

• Call for submissions to a Focus Collection on Environmental Sustainability and Health Care in the journal Environmental Research: Health. The submission window will close on 15 September 2024. Early submissions are welcome and encouraged, will be reviewed without delay, and published when ready on an incremental basis.

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