SHADE Newsletter 16th May 2024

Welcome to the thirteenth 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.

In this newsletter, we highlight the field of health impact attribution. We take a sweep through AMR, wildfires, the launch of AlphaFold 3 and bird flu in cows, learn about the complexities of the transition to clean energy, call out Microsoft, check out another batch of studies linking climate and health and 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 health impact attribution

• The Wellcome commissioned report on the Detection and Attribution of Climate Change Impacts on Human Health is out, with suggestions as to how the field can ‘catch up to the rapidly evolving crisis’. It points out that the nascent, and fragmented, ‘health impact attribution’ field has huge potential to shine a light on the growing cost of climate inaction.

• In the same space the 2024 Europe report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change is also out this month, with the latest on what its existing 42 climate health indicators are telling us, and the addition of 9 new indicators. The report clearly demonstrates that ‘unprecedented warming demands unprecedented action’.

News

• The UK government announces £85 million to tackle AMR globally.

• With numbers of wildfires predicted to increase significantly with global warming, The Telegraph reports on how AI is increasingly successful in responding to these fires. This protects firefighters and minimises the carbon emissions from these wildfires - which are currently greater every year than those from any country except China.

• Nature reports on the launch of AlphaFold 3 and its potential to boost drug discovery. Google DeepMind talk about the work they have done on understanding the ‘broad impact’ of AlphaFold - however, it appears that they have interpreted broad impact as biosecurity considerations. There are no details on environmental impact.

• With concern growing over bird flu in cows, the Journal of Medical Chemistry has a timely perspective proposing the application of modern drug discovery tools in human health, such as AlphaFold, to wildlife disease. Invoking One Health they point out multiple benefits in doing this, from staving off the disappearance of some species threatened by the current mass extinction event to improved pandemic preparedness from better understanding of wildlife disease. They call for more communication between medical chemistry and the emerging field of conservation medicine.

• Nature calls for more support for those adversely affected by the energy transition away from fossil fuels, drawing on data showing the economic stagnation and social division likely to result from a failure in this area.

• Grist reports on the successes, failures, and ultimately frustrations, of employees promoting sustainability within Microsoft.

What we’re listening to

• The latest episode from the One World, One Health podcast investigates how a phone based app could ensure that oxygen supplies don’t run out in future crises, the way they did during the Covid 19 pandemic.

• This Nature Careers podcast looks at using AI to help Ghana plan for a renewable future. A computer simulation linked to AI demonstrated the devastating impact to human health of an all out wind and solar expansion and recommended another strategy.

• This episode of Environment Variables from the Green Software Foundation looks to the accessibility movement for insights on greening software procurement.

What we’re reading

• This article examines how health technology assessment (HTA) can most effectively contribute to improving environmental sustainability in healthcare.

• Science reports on how Indian Ocean temperature anomalies predict long term global dengue trends

• The current understanding and knowledge gaps regarding wildlife as reservoirs of AMR highlight how easier genomic and metagenomic sequencing can be harnessed to increase the emerging understanding of the dynamics of AMR distribution across life on earth. This in turn may help uncover more on the links between AMR and climate change.

• The use of a new model to describe how malaria transmission is affected by temperature change, and data from specific locations in the Kenyan highlands, suggests that global warming in certain areas could have less of an effect on malaria transmission than had previously been thought.

• This paper from the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, identifies the global hotspots of climate related disasters and proposes nature based adaptation in highly impacted, less developed areas.

Events

• Less than 3 weeks to go before CleanMed Europe 2024, Healthcare without Harm Europe’s online conference June 3rd to June 7th.

• If you are a health professional in London on June 9th, join the UK Health Alliance on Climate Change’s Ride for their Lives round Regent’s Park.

• If you are in Montreal on June 10th, reserve a spot at Charting the Course: Navigating Climate Justice in the Digital Age.

• If you are in Edinburgh on June 5th, BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) is asking Where are AI’s Publics?

Opportunities

• The WHO Health Ethics and Governance Unit has issued a call for proposals to help facilitate the promotion of ethically sound and equitable climate and health research. The deadline for submissions is the 17th June.

• Labos 1point5 have put out a call for one page abstracts, related to the greening of research activities, for oral and poster communications at their conference happening in Paris on November 6th and 7th. The deadline for submissions is 30th June, and the selection of abstracts for the conference will happen on July 21st.

• As part of their new project to provide insights on how ethics can help decision-makers balance the trade-offs in addressing the impact of climate change on health, the Nuffield Council on Bioethics have issued two invitations to tender - one for an Environment, Health and Ethics Literature Review and one for an Environment and Health Law and Regulatory Overview.

And finally, a long read from Noema on rewilding the Internet.

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