SHADE Newsletter 22nd February 2024

Welcome to the seventh 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 recent studies combining climate and health data. We take a sweep through peaks, tipping points and One Health stories, find data centres in unlikely places, take a look at different flavours of precision medicine, explore emerging tools, standards and frameworks for environmentally sustainable tech 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 Studies Combining Climate data with Health data

• New studies on the mortality risks from tropical cyclones and cold spells lay the foundations for mitigating the extremes of climate change

• A new study assesses the impact of climate change on the expansion of West Nile Virus in Europe 

• A white paper from the Exhaustion project makes key policy and research recommendations in the light of the threat to Europe of an almost 50% increase in temperature related mortality linked to climate change.

News

• Nature reports on the soaring, and mostly secret, environmental costs of generative AI and calls for action that goes beyond the voluntary measures proposed in the AI Environmental Impacts Act put forward by US Democrats on February 1st. It also highlights that AI models developed for research only are exempt from the EU’s AI Act, even if they are in the top risk category. This means that research only general purpose models will not be required to be transparent about their energy consumption, however big (compute intensive) they are.

• Scott Logic propose a Technology Carbon Standard to help organisations quantify and minimise the carbon footprint of their technology estate. Oliver Cronk explains more.

• Good news on the likelihood of carbon emissions peaking from Climate Analytics. But bad news on how close we are to a tipping point in ocean circulation, the results of which would outpace any attempt at adaptation.

• Could functional precision medicine be more effective than genomics guided precision medicine and would its environmental impact be less?

• AI could help end animal testing by pharma companies, reports the Financial Times.

• Moro Hub and NVIDIA plan for a “world-class green AI data centre in the UAE”.

What we’re listening to

• “Take any observation and convert it to environmental impacts”. That’s the goal of the Green Software Foundation’s Impact Framework project and what Carbon Hack 2024, starting in March, is focussed on. It’s a plug in fest with prizes - check it out in this announcement. You don’t have to be technical to take part.

• This episode of the Environment Variables podcast looks at Embodied Carbon.

• Another example of combining health and climate data comes in this podcast from the One Health Trust on Air Pollution, Depression and Pregnancy.

What we’re reading

• Quantifying the carbon footprint of clinical trials - guidance development and case studies from the Low Carbon Clinical Trials group.

• Ten recommendations for reducing the carbon footprint of research computing in human neuroimaging from Imaging Neuroscience.

• A paper proposing the ESC framework as a holistic approach to environmentally sustainable computing for academia and industry.

• Emerging recommendations on reducing the carbon footprint of fMRI

Events

• The free, online SHARE conference (Sustainable Healthcare Academic Research and Enterprise) is happening this year on June 25th. Deadlines for abstract submissions are 1st March for oral presentations or posters, and April 15th for Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC) posters.

• The AI for Good Global Summit runs 30 to 31st May 2024. Register for a general or virtual pass for free.

• The Institute of Government and Public Policy (IGPP) is running the third Annual Healthcare Innovation and Technology Conference and Exhibition on February 27th in London.

• The IGPP is also running the Second Annual National Sustainable Healthcare Conference on May 22nd 2024 in London. You can book to attend and submit a case study or address.

Opportunities

• The UK Government Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) is inviting tenders by March 13th to conduct a rapid evidence assessment of the research literature on interventions designed to build health systems in LMICs.

• The deadline for the Wellcome Climate Impacts Awards is April 3rd.

• Wellcome have another funding opportunity - the Bioimaging Technology Development Awards, application deadline April 30th.

• Call for contributions to the Green Web Foundation’s Branch magazine - deadline February 27th.

And finally, check out PauseAI and calculate your p(doom) value.

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