SHADE Newsletter 22nd August 2024

Welcome to the twentieth 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 our newly compiled resources for those operating in the SHADE space. We take a sweep through research into the effects of heat on human health, check in on tech’s AI race and the legal, regulatory and ‘clean’ energy sourcing efforts to keep up with this, shine a light on AI research funding, demonstrate low tech sustainable health solutions - and the need for no tech solutions - 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].   

HIGHLIGHTING NEW RESOURCES

• Check out the new Resources tab on the SHADE website. It provides access to a wealth of resources in the SHADE space, from peer reviewed papers to tools to observatories to podcasts to blogs. Let us know if you think anything is missing at [email protected].

News

• Nature reports on belated data gathering on the effects of heating - and cooling methods - on human health.

• An AI powered chatbot that facilitates data sharing by untangling the legal complexity has already boosted a project to tease out the effects of heat on wellbeing and disease in Africa.

• In a week where Europe has again seen smoke from wildfires in Canada, the largest study of Canada’s 2023 wildfire season delivers sobering conclusions.

• The International Court of Justice will start considering the responsibilities of countries in relation to climate harms - Nature asks if this could this be a game changer on climate policy.

• AINews highlights the dilemma faced by the tech companies in going green - and how they are betting on speeding up not slowing down.

• The FT reports on Amazon, Meta and Big Tech’s bid to rewrite the rules on net zero. This report exposes what’s been happening behind the scenes of the very different approaches to net zero between Google and Amazon, something recently highlighted in this newsletter.

• Meanwhile Nature shines a light on who is behind the most highly cited papers on AI. Spoiler alert it’s Big Tech.

• Super computers, AI and flop count - where will the UK’s ‘AI Action Plan’ funding be focussed? asks the FT.

What we’re listening to

• This episode of the Green Software Foundation’s CXO Bytes podcast takes us to the AI Ready Infrastructure Panel at the AWS summit, held in Washington in June. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a largely optimistic view.

• The Climate and Us series from the Global Climate and Health Alliance includes films highlighting how data collection and digital technology can be used to, for example, tackle air pollution in Indonesia and address water scarcity in Nigeria.

• Healthy? Extreme heat could still threaten your life from Bloomberg’s Zero podcast.

What we’re reading

• Nature-based solutions are essential for climate and health action - this paper in the Lancet highlights the need to embrace One Health, work across disciplines and address the data gap on the health benefits of nature based solutions.

• A global foresight report on planetary health and human wellbeing from the UN Environment Programme. This report describes some of the ways in which capacity for applying foresight can be built. It sets out to encompass all factors that could determine the future trajectory for planetary health and human wellbeing.

• Every baby deserves access to genetic screening declares Nature. The editorial acknowledges the social justice challenges in delivering this but makes no mention of the potential environmental impacts.

• A clutch of articles on data centres, their energy demands and how these demands could be more sustainably addressed. Freethink looks into the future of data centres, on land, at sea and in space. Meanwhile CNBC and IEEE Spectrum look at the immediate challenges thrown up by tech’s race for nuclear power to support AI..

Events

• Our health, our planet, our future: climate change and planetary health at LSHTM. Register for this free hybrid event on November 8th.

• LOCO 2024, the first international workshop on low carbon computing, takes place in Glasgow on December 3rd. Registration will open in early September, meanwhile more details, including submission dates, can be found here.

Opportunities

• Frontiers in Digital Health have a call for submissions on the Environmental Impact of Digital Health. The deadline for manuscript summary submission is September 23rd, and the deadline for manuscript submission is January 11th 2025.

We hope you have enjoyed this newsletter. If it has been forwarded to you, and you would like to receive future editions, you can subscribe here