SHADE Newsletter 11th September 2025

Welcome to the forty first 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?

From now on the SHADE newsletter will be coming out every 3 months. It will take 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 a research participation opportunity and a new tool - both of which are brought to you by SHADE members. We zoom in on two topics - raising the profile of environmental sustainability in ‘ethical AI’ and extreme weather. We conclude with a selection of resources and events. 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].   

Opportunities

• Are you working in health research in the UK? Check out this opportunity to help shape the future of sustainable research practices from the SHARE project - which includes many SHADE members!

• Are you looking for a simple tool that can help you consider the environmental impacts of a digital health system?  The Green Digital Health Tool adopts a ‘systems thinking’ approach to go beyond carbon calculators and consider data sufficiency and the mitigation of rebound effects. It grew out of two projects involving SHADE members. It is free to use and share and we would love to hear any feedback on it at at [email protected].

Bringing sustainability to the fore in AI

• From the Lancet Global Health, Climate change and health: the next challenge of ethical AI. Noting that the environmental impact of AI on health remains largely unaddressed in both global health and bioethics, this article interrogates how the inclusion of AI's environmental impact necessarily reshapes established ethical commitments in AI ethics frameworks. It proposes concrete strategies for accountability in the area of global health.

• Meanwhile this opinion piece in Nature from Microsoft’s senior global director for Sustainability Science and Innovation argues that Net Zero needs AI but that a key proviso is to ‘govern AI for Earth alignment’.

• As the BBC reports that the number of data centres in the UK is set to increase by almost a fifth, the Group of Experts on Energy Efficiency at the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) have prepared a paper for the UNECE Sustainable Energy week in Geneva starting September 29th: Intersection between large-scale digitalization and environmental sustainability: an overview of use and impact of data centres. The paper acknowledges that the green transition of data centres will not be achieved by industry alone and requires ‘a new generation of policies that move beyond energy efficiency toward holistic environmental accountability’.

• More than Carbon: Cradle-to-Grave environmental impacts of GenAI training on the Nvidia A100 GPU. This study in Computers and Society is the most detailed environmental impact study on AI to date. Amongst other things it highlights the adverse impacts of the manufacturing phase, including direct impacts to human health at production sites.

• Switzerland launches its own open-source AI model reports Engadget. Maxime Greneu on LinkedIn gives the lowdown on how this model, Apertus, addresses many of the ethical dilemmas surrounding AI models, including environmental impacts, in both training and inference stages - and also how it raises new dilemmas.

Extreme Weather

• Untangling the fragmented landscape of extreme heat services and warning systems: From Environmental Research Letters, this perspective examines the reasons for the diversity and conceptual fragmentation of extreme heat warning systems and makes recommendations to help national meteorological and health authorities improve coordination for reducing health and societal impacts.

• The BBC reports on research from Imperial College showing that UK cities are facing a growing threat from an emerging phenomenon called "firewaves" as temperatures rise due to climate change. The research used detailed incident data from the London Fire Brigade dating back to 2009, combined with weather records to identify key factors that drive wildfire outbreaks in London.

• As the BBC asks why so many die in Pakistan when Monsoon rains happen every year, an AP article explains more on one contributing factor that is exacerbated by climate change - cloudbursts.

• From the International Journal of Emergency Medicine, Climate change and the global food chain: a catalyst for emerging infectious diseases? This literature review draws on multiple studies to draw out the impacts of extreme weather events and habitat destruction on zoonotic and food borne diseases. It concludes that ‘climate change is a critical public health emergency with risks of zoonotic and food-borne illnesses alarmingly on the rise' and calls for a One Health approach to address this.

• This paper in Nature Microbiology analyses data on a particular phytoplankton cell lying at the heart of the food web. It shows that these cells could decline drastically by the end of the century under both moderate and severe climate change scenarios. This could trigger cascading effects through the food web, destabilise the microbial community and alter carbon cycles.

• From Nature Climate Change, a longitudinal study on nearly 25,000 people throws light on the long-term impacts of heatwaves on accelerated ageing with the impact broadly comparable with the damage smoking, alcohol use, poor diet or limited exercise can have on health..

Resources and Events

• Noting the growing concerns about energy use and sustainability of the high compute, training intensive ‘frontier’ AI models, the Alan Turing Institute demonstrates that a model small enough to run locally on a laptop can achieve ‘near-frontier reasoning performance on real-world health queries’. Meanwhile, however, the FT asks Why is AI struggling to discover new drugs? It notes suggestions that larger models, more data and big tech companies - rather than cash constrained start ups - may provide the answer.

• In mid August Nature pulled together the data so far on the impact of this summer’s record temperatures in Europe. At the end of August World Weather Attribution published an analysis showing that weather conditions leading to deadly wildfires in Türkiye, Cyprus and Greece were made 10 times more likely due to climate change. At the start of September the BBC confirmed that summer 2025 was the UK's hottest on record, having highlighted the scale of the problems relating to overheating homes in the UK.

• Two articles on mosquito borne diseases and their relationships with climate: Firstly, this study in Science Translational Medicine paints a clearer picture of the relationship between mosquito-borne dengue and climatic conditions in the Americas. The analysis uncovers seasonal patterns which could anticipate future outbreaks. Secondly, from the International Journal of Health Geographics, this study on malaria in Tanzania between 2016 and 2023 uses high quality data gathered through DHIS2 to reveal associations with climate and intervention factors.

• Shaping Climate-Resilient Healthcare in Europe: Through Policy and Practice: Health Care Without Harm are hosting this webinar at 3pm CEST on September 24th. Registration is required.

And finally, the Green Web Foundation’s toolkit for Grid Aware Websites is coming soon. Learn more about this and find out how the toolkit was used in Issue 9 of Branch magazine in Designing a Grid-Aware Branch

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