SHADE Newsletter 18th April 2024

Welcome to the eleventh 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 eco-anxiety. We take a sweep through dust storms and oceans, check in on the hype around nuclear for both energy and healthcare, call out a MedTech magazine, revisit One Health, discover AI futurism 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 Eco-anxiety

• Nature reports on the rise of eco-anxiety and calls for climate scientists and mental health researchers to work together to measure the mental health burden of climate change and track it over time, particularly in low and middle income countries. The second article highlights how adaptation to, and mitigation of, climate change may both be achieved by acknowledging the scale of eco-anxiety and channelling it into climate activism.

• One activism route is through the courts - climate lawsuits are increasing and research indicates that they are having significant impact. Their impacts include governments’ strengthening or bringing forward their emissions reductions targets. More funding is now being directed to support climate lawsuits in the global south. With increasing evidence to support the lawsuits, a virtuous circle may be set up to address not only eco-anxiety but the health impacts of climate change more generally.

News

• Nature pulls together the latest research on dust storms - their health impacts, how AI is helping to accurately predict them and their relationship with climate change and rainfall.

• The global public health community is called on to get serious about healthwashing in climate change negotiations by identifying it, analysing its impacts and establishing mechanisms to effectively confront it.

• Intelligent HealthTech runs a feature on greening the healthcare sector (page 33). It focusses on recycling medical devices, solar panels to generate a hospital’s energy, and electric vehicles/ medical transportation. The rest of the magazine is filled with tech innovation running in the cloud. The environmental impacts of this are not mentioned.

• The US state of Virginia is the latest place to illustrate concerns about the unsustainable demands, and environmental harms, of proliferating data centres. Co-locating data centres with nuclear power providers is one solution being put forward. Having reliable nuclear power generation in close proximity to healthcare is also increasingly important - nuclear power generators can produce medical isotopes, which are otherwise often imported and can be subject to acute global shortages.

What we’re listening to

• The BBC’s Inside Science reports on the bird flu outbreak in cows - and a human. This is also the subject of the latest podcast from the One Health Trust, which talks to Dr Richard Webby about the importance of monitoring bird flu.

• Making computing greener from Code for Thought. This episode features Loic Lannelongue, whose Green Algorithms project recently won the 2024 Health Data Research UK award for Impact of the Year.

• The Outrage and Optimism podcast talks to Hannah Ritchie about her definition of a sustainable planet, and the data, co-benefits and cautious optimism surrounding it.

• Small modular reactors (SMRs) are hyped as the solution for providing flexible and distributed generation of nuclear power - increasingly in demand for data centres and hospitals (see the last news item above). These two short items examine the opportunities and risks that small modular reactors (SMRs) present - first, a quick explainer from Planet A and second, Nuclear Illusions from the Energy Transition Show.

What we’re reading

• This perspective in Environmental Research Letters argues for better integration of health and economic impact assessments of climate change.

• Simulations from the Graph Neural Network model, a One Health based framework, emerged as the best ones for determining intervention strategies to combat high temperature related diseases globally.

• A study of the environmental benefits of telemedicine in paediatrics.

• An exploratory approach to incorporating carbon footprint in Health Technology Assessment Modelling. This paper uses obesity intervention in the UK as a case study.

• This paper takes an unfiltered look at AI’s true effects on the climate crisis, introducing us to AI futurism, the smartness mandate and AI capitalism. This piece from the Climate Change and Planetary Health Centre at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine presents another perspective, exploring how climate change threatens the right to health, and how scientific research is paving the way for a healthier, more sustainable future.

Events

• The 2024 Lancet Countdown in Europe Report launches on May 13th. Register for the online launch event and submit questions for the expert panel discussion.

• CleanMed Europe 2024 is happening online June 3rd to June 7th. This year’s theme is Accelerating Sustainable Healthcare Together.

Opportunities

• The Lancet Commission on Sustainable Healthcare is seeking case studies that will add to their understanding of how health systems around the world are taking action on sustainability. Submit your case study before August 30th (submission deadline has been extended).

• Want to work for an organisation conducting research around AI? The Ada Lovelace institute is hiring a researcher into the impacts of AI and data on people and society. Application deadline is May 7th. AINow is hiring two senior roles in policy and operations. Application deadline for both is May 2nd.

• Environmental Research: Health is inviting submissions for a Focus on Environmental Sustainability and Health Care. The submission window closes on 15th September.

And finally, check out this special edition of First Monday, Ideologies of AI and the consolidation of power.

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