SHADE Newsletter 17th October 2024

Welcome to the twenty 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 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 Pharma - the wins, opportunities and regulatory challenges. We check in on AI’s success at the Nobel prizes, take a sweep through data centres, climate overshoot, e-waste, dengue and Marburg. We hear the latest on heat stress in babies and nature’s carbon sinks, call out the growth agenda, give it up for bats in Ireland 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 Pharma

• This year’s winners of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry revolutionised drug development when they ‘revealed proteins’ secrets through computing and artificial intelligence’: It is no surprise that AI is driving the digital transformation of pharma.

• Meanwhile concerns around the sustainability of medicines are prompting calls for EU pharmaceutical legislation to incorporate better standards and data to support environmentally sustainable prescribing. Addressing these concerns is also behind a Horizon Europe project which has developed a holistic framework for integrated sustainability assessment of pharmaceuticals. This framework considers both the footprint and ‘handprint’ of pharmaceuticals. Along with the environmental, it incorporates the economic and social dimensions of sustainability in the footprint, and the handprint looks at the societal benefits of the pharmaceutical.

• A success story from Pharma’s research into potential epidemic diseases comes in the rapid response to the Marburg outbreak in Rwanda. However, climate change is contributing to the frequency of viral outbreaks such as Marburg.

News

• AI sweeps the Nobel Prizes. The winners illustrate the optimistic and the anxious views of where it will take us, with the optimists focussing on its potential for medical breakthroughs and addressing climate change.

• As Google turns to nuclear to power AI data centres, and “unlock the full potential of AI for everyone”, opposition to data centres is in the news: Bat concerns stop a data centre in Ireland, and public interest groups come together to challenge President Biden to meet with them to discuss the environmental, societal and economic costs of data centres needed to power AI companies. Meanwhile economic growth remains the priority in the UK: AI and digital in healthcare and Engineering Biology are two of the first four targets as the UK government announces the launch of a dedicated unit to ‘curb red tape’ and so speed up the introduction of new technologies “like AI for better treatments in our NHS”.

• Pressure grows on the upcoming COP29 in Baku: Nature is calling for emissions to be “cut, cut, cut” and highlighting the ethical questions of overshoot, pointing out that “only rapid near term emission reductions are effective in reducing climate risk”. The Guardian reports on how the state of Earth’s ‘vital signs’ are causing more scientists to look into the possibility of societal collapse. This comment piece from Nature makes the case for activism in climate science.

• In the wake of hurricanes Helene and Milton, Carbon Brief explains how hotter oceans can fuel more intense Atlantic hurricanes and climate change is identified as a key driver of the catastrophic impacts of Hurricane Helene.

What we’re listening to and looking at

• Data Vampires: Going Hyperscale is the first episode of a four part podcast series from Tech Won’t Save Us. This episode tells the story of the start of the cloud and the emergence of the hyperscalers. Episode 2 looks at opposition to date centres.

• The photos in this story, which come from the E-waste in Ghana: Tracing Transboundary Flows project, may make you re-think your relationship with the electronics in your life.

• Meanwhile Planet A highlights how Europe is starting to address its e-waste problems and right to repair is now the law in California.

What we’re reading

• First evidence suggests heat stress may still affect babies once born: A secondary analysis of data collected during a clinical trial in the Gambia builds on research showing the vulnerability to heat stress of the first trimester of pregnancy.

• This opinion piece from the BMJ looks at the growing threat of mis- and disinformation about climate change and health. It includes AI’s role in exacerbating and reducing this threat.

• Checkout this dengue tracker and its associated preprint on dengue nowcasting in Brazil.

• Redirecting Europe’s AI Industrial Policy From Competitiveness to Public Interest from AINow. This report points out the serious climate impacts from large scale AI’s current trajectory, and calls for Europe to avoid incentivising blanket AI adoption in the public sector. It also calls for Europe to challenge the existing concentrations of power in the AI stack, something illuminated in this 2022 paper analysing how Big Tech platforms entered into Healthcare and Education.

• A paper in the Lancet lays out the priority actions necessary for strengthening Primary Health Care in a Changing Climate.

• Everyone must understand the environmental costs of AI from the OECD AI Policy Observatory. This observatory maintains a catalogue of tools and metrics for trustworthy AI - you can, for example, search for tools with a sustainability objective in the health sector.

• From Neurocomputing, the optimistically titled A review of green artificial intelligence: Towards a more sustainable future. This paper looks at green-by AI and green-in AI as well as the role of regulation in promoting green AI and emerging trends in green AI.

• This preprint suggests nature’s carbon sinks may be failing, and our climate modelling way too optimistic.

• This pre-print introduces a maturity model for Corporate Digital Responsibility that encompasses both environmental and social. considerations.

• Two pieces that illustrate the different views around AI and climate change: In NVIDIA: Can AI Green Itself”, ESG News proclaims AI to be a “driver of sustainable innovation - including addressing its own sustainability challenges”. Meanwhile James Temple, in Sorry, AI won’t “fix” climate change for MIT Technology Review, points out that “the one thing we can state confidently about generative AI is that it’s making the hardest problem we’ve ever had to solve that much harder to solve”.

Events

• The Global Launch of the 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change is happening on October 30th at 3pm GMT.

• The Africa Health Agenda International Conference 2025 is happening in Kigali, Rwanda between the 2nd and 5th of March. Early bird passes on sale up to December 31st.

• The 2025 DHIS2 Annual Conference will be happening between the 10th and 13th of June at the University of Oslo in Norway. Early bird registration will open in January and a Call for Abstracts will open in the coming weeks.

Opportunities

• Health in a Changing Climate special issue - a call for papers from Oxford Open Climate Change. The deadline for submissions has been extended to 31st January 2025.

• The UK National Institute for Health and Care Research launches new funding that aims to drive a health and social care prevention revolution. Priorities include ‘analogue to digital’ (novel approaches to screen and detect ill health). Note that all research proposals will be expected to consider reducing health inequalities, promoting economic growth and accelerating the speed and adoption of innovation in the health and care system. There is no explicit mention of environmental considerations.

And finally if you are looking for some wider reading, try Meditations on Tech-Fueled Visions for Canada’s “Green” Future from Heliotrope, and How to think like a sociotechnical researcher, from Ranjit Singh, s senior researcher at Data & Society’s AIMLab.

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