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- SHADE Newsletter 28th November 2024
SHADE Newsletter 28th November 2024
Welcome to the twenty 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 the costs of delaying action on climate change. We take a sweep through the latest on climate health analytics, bird flu, data centres, war zones, heat exposure and hurricanes, check in on tools and guides for climate mitigation and adaptation, call out the biggest contributors to climate change, take a look at AI and biosecurity 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 shade@kcl.ac.uk.
Highlight on the Costs of Inaction
Rethinking digitalization and climate: don’t predict, mitigate from npj Climate Action highlights that digital carbon footprints are ‘inherently unpredictable’. The paper builds on uncertainty literature to argue that we should practice mitigation, even in the absence of accurate prediction.
From the World Bank, The Cost of Inaction: Quantifying the Impact of Climate Change on Health in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
News
The Climate Health Analytics Platform (CHAP) has just launched. It includes streamlined integration with the DHIS2 system for accessing health data and disseminating forecasts through the new DHIS2 Prediction App (currently in pilot stage), but is also fully functional as a stand-alone platform. Initial use cases are focussed on predicting malaria and dengue outbreaks, but CHAP could be leveraged for a range of climate sensitive health impacts.
Health Care Without Harm (HCWH) Europe launches its Practical Guide for Building Climate-Resilient Health Systems.
Carbon Brief has the lowdown on COP29.
Nature reports on an alarming bird flu infection in Canada.
The UK government publishes its Model for Responsible Innovation. This is a practical tool created to help teams across the public sector and beyond to innovate responsibly with data and AI.
This news feature from Nature looks at the role of health technology in war zones. It notes how conflict affects many health challenges also associated with climate change, such as AMR, and also how more ‘boring’ health tech, such as electronic medical records, can make a big difference for displaced people.
Climate TRACE data reveal high-impact opportunities for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. For the first time, Climate TRACE provides monthly emissions data for every country and every major individual source of emissions in the world. It now also tracks “key non-GHG air pollutants for the world’s largest single point sources of emissions, including pollutants that are implicated in millions of deaths around the world every year”.
In Malaysia, sustainability concerns lead to the rejection of data centre applications. In the UK a new “cloud region” goes ahead and data centre applications undertake to use excess heat to heat swimming pools.
What we’re listening to/ looking at
The latest dataset is up on Climate Trace, the most comprehensive GHG emissions inventory globally.
In this Youth Ownership of Digital Health podcast, Michael Kakande interviews Heidi Good. Heidi talks about her project to build a global goods guidebook for climate and health, and how the Climate Informed Data Services for Health track at the upcoming Global Digital Health Forum in Nairobi will feed into this.
Check out the November 14th episode of the Solving for Climate podcast where Dr Hannah Richie and Rob Stewart talk to Dr Sasha Luccioni about the climate cost of AI.
What we’re reading
This new analysis, reviewed in Nature, shows that climate change has driven hurricane wind speeds up by an average of nearly 30 kilometres per hour.
A systematic review and meta-analysis of heat exposure impacts on maternal, fetal and neonatal health from Nature Medicine.
Circular strategy assessment for digital services: The CADiS framework from Sustainable Production and Consumption. This framework is designed to integrate circular economy strategies throughout the life cycle of digital services. Through a real-world case study of a digital health service, the authors demonstrate the framework's effectiveness and its potential for broader applications.
A round up on the ‘contribution to climate change’ rankings: In terms of energy consumption, Hannah Richie (see also ‘what we’re listening to’ above) points out that AI is by no means the worst offender. Meanwhile Carbon bootprint from Context looks at the military who, as state based conflicts rise, are estimated to account for 5.5% of global CO2 emissions although, perhaps unsurprisingly ‘data is lacking’. This paper from Communications, Earth and Environment shows that private aviation is making a growing combination to climate change while this article from Cipher reports on a low cost solution that could cut the climate impact of aviation in half. To round off, this study in Nature analyses consumption and environmental footprint data to demonstrate that “the global top 20% of consumers could adopt the consumption levels and patterns that have the lowest environmental impacts within their quintile, yielding a reduction of 25–53% in environmental pressure”.
A preprint from the Social Science Research Network: AI, Climate, and Regulation: From Data Centers to the AI Act. The paper provides both guidance and concrete policy proposals for climate related regulation of data centres and AI.
Gartner predicts power shortages as generative AI drives increases in energy demand that exceed power utilities capacity. It notes that attempts to meet the energy demand will adversely impact zero carbon sustainability goals and recommends that organisations ‘re-evaluate’ their goals. Deloitte, however, thinks there is a way through. Meanwhile Adrian Cockcroft, an ex AWS insider, is not confident that AWS has anything new to offer on sustainability.
From Nature, AI could pose pandemic-scale biosecurity risks. Here’s how to make it safer.
Events
You can still register for virtual participation at the Global Digital Health Forum which is taking place next week in Nairobi.
The Digital Ethics Summit 2024 from TechUK is happening on December 4th in London.
GreenIO Paris is on next week - 3rd to the 5th December.
Opportunities
An ethics assessment tool for artificial intelligence implementation in healthcare: CARE-AI is proposed in Nature Medicine. The authors ‘welcome interested global stakeholders to join this collaborative effort’.
A call for abstracts for a special issue in Sociology of Health and Illness: Algorithms in Health and Medicine: Sociological Inquiries into Current Disruptions and Future Imaginaries. The deadline for abstract submission is January 6th 2025.
Call for Abstracts at the DHIS2 Annual Conference 2025 is now open - submission deadline is February 2nd 2025.
Twelfth EDCTP Forum: Call for abstracts and scientific symposia open! The Twelfth European and Developing Countries Clinical Trials Partnership Forum will take place in Kigali, Rwanda from 15-20 June 2025. The deadline for submissions is 23 February 2025.
And finally, following reports in the October 17th edition of this newsletter on the Marburg virus outbreak in Rwanda, and how climate change can contribute to the frequency of such outbreaks, a sobering first hand account of the Rwandan experience.
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