SHADE Newsletter 18th July 2024

Welcome to the eighteenth edition of the SHADE newsletter!  It’s a week early as SHADE are away next week - so this instalment is to tide you over until the next scheduled newsletter on the 8th of August.

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 wearable tech. We look at the latest on AI for good and bad, check in on the reaction to the UK’s green physician toolkit, call out Amazon’s clean energy claims, challenge Meta’s assumptions, touch base with telemedicine, hear the latest advice for climate communicators 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 Wearables

• Samsung extols the virtues of its new smart ring and wider AI powered Galaxy ecosystem as the BBC looks at smart rings more generally.

• Meanwhile Which? explains the environmental issues with wearable tech, and how users can minimise them.

• From an environmental justice perspective this US report indicates that wearables can make a positive contribution.

• The American Psychological Association reports on how wearables, AI and telehealth can help in adaptation to climate change, specifically child and adolescent response to trauma resulting from climate related events.

News

• AI’s energy demands are out of control reports Wired.

• Amazon’s latest clean energy claims are called into question as its own employees highlight a different story.

• The Daily Mail reacts to the ‘green physician toolkit’ from the Royal College of Physicians, which provides a range of actions doctors can take to help mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

• The Harvard Business Review calls for AI’s negative environmental impact to be equitably distributed.

• This Opinion piece from the BMJ reports on the What Works Climate Solutions Summit held in June, and how health was recognised as both a driver and outcome of effective climate action. It identifies evidence synthesis as crucial - for both policy making and identifying primary research gaps - and the need to move beyond traditional systematic reviews.

What we’re listening to

• The Lancet Public Health in conversation with Rachel Lowe on health and climate change in Europe.

• An episode of the Energy Transition podcast asking what kinds of messages get people interested in taking action on climate change. This episode has been made feely available because the information is ‘critically important for all climate communicators to understand’.

• Planet A’s latest offering on how concentrated solar power could provide energy at night - and how China is encouraging it.

What we’re reading

• The Environmental Costs of Artificial Intelligence for Healthcare. This perspective from the Asian Bioethics Review critically interrogates the contradiction at the centre of AI for healthcare.

• An Australian perspective on the potential of virtual healthcare technologies to reduce healthcare services’ carbon footprint.

• A preprint in the Lancet, Greening Healthcare and Slashing Carbon Emissions Through Telemedicine, looks at over 50,000 remote appointments at a Brazilian hospital serving a wide geographical area.

• Beyond Efficiency: Scaling AI Sustainably from Meta, looks at what can be done to reduce carbon emissions across all the stages of the AI lifecycle, including manufacture of the infrastructure that supports AI as well as what happens to it at end of life. However, it is based on the the premise that ‘we cannot reduce what cannot be measured’: Will this measurement ever be deemed accurate enough?

• Leveraging data science and machine learning for urban climate adaptation in two major African cities. The ultimate goal of this project, which runs until 2026, is to foster climate resilient African cities, protecting disproportionately affected populations from heat hazards.

• AI for the Climate. Jo Lindsay Walton takes a look at what exactly AI can offer to address climate change.

Events

• The Greener Healthcare and Sustainability Project (GHASP) 2024 Conference is happening virtually and in person in Leeds on September 27th. Tickets are available here and you can also submit an abstract to present as a poster at the conference - the deadline for submissions is August 16th.

Opportunities

• Call for Proposals: Climate Change AI Innovation Grants 2024 - $1.4M in total and up to $150,000 per proposal. Submission deadline is 15th September and you can register for informational webinars on July 30th or August 15th.

And finally What is AI? A long read from MIT Technology Review

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