SHADE Newsletter 12th March 2026

Welcome to the forty fourth 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 four times a year. It takes an in depth look at selected topics, as well as highlighting new resources, events and opportunities in the SHADE space.

In this newsletter we pick up on the ongoing debate about the environmental impacts of AI and the data centres it relies on, including how these impacts are obscured, and who should be held responsible for them. We follow this up with a look at recent studies highlighting the health impacts of climate change, how these can be mitigated and how, for some sectors (spoiler alert - oil and gas firms), extreme weather events can have a positive impact financially. We conclude with a packed selection of resources, events and opportunities. 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].   

AI and Data Centres’ Environmental Impacts

• The AI Climate Hoax: Behind the Curtain of How Big Tech Greenwashes Impacts. This analysis by Ketan Joshi, and supported by Stand.earth, Beyond Fossil Fuels, Climate Action Against Disinformation, Green Web Foundation and the Green Screen Coalition, was published in February 2026.

• This article in the New Internationalist looks at how data centres are changing landscapes and communities in Pennsylvania. Meanwhile, in response to growing concerns about the scale of planned data centre expansion and the omission of data centres from the UK government’s net zero plan, the UK’s energy secretary Ed Milliband defends the omssion by describing the impact of data centres as inherently uncertain. This has prompted a new enquiry from MPs into the environmental impacts of the planned data centres, with Friends of the Earth saying if the planned data centres come online they will consume more electricity each day than the entire country does now.

• Computer Weekly asks who should bear responsibility for the environmental impacts of AI, arguing that it shouldn’t just be the hyperscalars, but that enterprise IT leaders should also step up. Meanwhile in the Bulletin of the World Health Organisation, SHADE’s co-leads look at the ethical and social difficulties of addressing environmental harms related to health research. They highlight that simply relying on health researchers to use tools developed in high-income countries to address the environmental harms of their research (such as carbon calculators to assess the emissions relating to the use of AI), may ‘shift responsibility away from the broader structural, institutional and geopolitical factors associated with the environmental harms of research’.

Health (and financial) impacts of climate change

• This pre-print in BMC Public Health uses Spain’s real time mortality monitoring system to reveal the excess mortality attributable to high temperatures during the summers of 2021 to 2024.

• A slew of recent climate health related analyses coming out of the EHM Lab includes, from npj Urban Sustainability, an analysis of a decade of data indicating that greening mitigates heat-related mortality in Paris. It finds that trees are better than grass and greening benefits appear to include improving pollution and mental health as well as cooling.

• What Firms Actually Lose (and Gain) from Extreme Weather Event Impacts: This paper from the Hong Kong University Business School uses a new, more comprehensive LLM powered method to assess the financial impact on companies of extreme weather events. The results include the positive financial impacts experienced by oil and gas firms as a result of winter storms when extreme energy price surges offset losses due to damage to infrastructure and operations.

Resources, Events and Opportunities

• A reminder that registration is open for the first ever DHIS2 Climate & Health Academy. This will take place in Oslo, Norway from June 15th to June 18th 2026, in parallel with the DHIS2 Annual Conference. Find out more and register..

• Spatiotemporal Modeling of Climate-Sensitive Diseases: The HISP Centre and their partners at the Barcelona Computing Centre hosted a public webinar series covering time series modeling, statistics and machine learning, climate-health relations, DHIS2 tools, the Chap Modeling Platform, and climate/GIS data integration amongst other topics.

• The HISP Centre has released DHIS2 Climate Tools, a fully open-source, Python-based toolkit containing libraries, workflows, and how-to guides that you can use to access, process, and upload both local and global climate, weather and environmental data—or other geospatial datasets—to DHIS2 and the Chap Modeling Platform to support your climate-health data needs.

• Join leading experts in sustainable healthcare at CleanMed Europe from 23rd to 25th June 2026. The event is online and, for the first day, can also be attended in person in London. Early bird tickets with a 20% discount are available until 20th March.

• An opportunity for PhD students to explore sustainable approaches to research at the British Library on March 17th, ‘likely avenues of exploration include decarbonisation and net zero, biodiversity, planetary boundaries, carbon markets, climate adaptation, green growth and degrowth, and the intersection of AI and the environment’.

• From Global Justice Now in partnership with the Balanced Economy Project, Resisting Big Tech Empires, Saturday 11th April, 11am to 6pm at London South Bank University. Find out more and book your free place.

And finally, Does that use a lot of energy? from Hannah Ritchie: Compare the daily energy consumption of different products and activities.

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