SHADE Newsletter 2nd May 2024

Welcome to the twelfth 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 examples of the delicate balance between AI for good and AI for bad when it comes to the environmental impacts of healthcare. We take a sweep through the latest on tools, bring you the 2024 editions of key reports, check out breaking weather anomalies globally and showcase a wealth of research and applications focussed on analysing data to establish the links between climate change and health.  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 the balance between AI for good and AI for bad when assessing the environmental impacts of healthcare

• Tackling this balance head on, and noting healthcare as one of the key arenas where the broader, indirect environmental impacts of AI will play out, Nature calls for the introduction, and agile evolution, of AI driven emissions scenarios.

• AI has had some of its biggest successes in healthcare in the field of medical imaging but the jury is out about the net environmental impacts of its use in this field. Now AI is showing promise in removing the need for contrast agents in medical imaging. This is timely as concerns rise about the environmental impact of gadolinium-based contrast agents, hitherto essential for diagnostic MRI scans.

• Nature reports on how AI powered hand held devices are “democratising” medicine, and IT research company Cutter and industry player Salesforce have highlighted how smaller AI models are better environmentally, financially and in terms of performance and explainability, than one general purpose Large Language Model. However, the Cutter article also points out that democratised AI, and the consequent ability for many more people to host and fine tune smaller AI models, will complicate efforts to track environmental impacts.

News

• Pilosa is a new tool coming that promises real time carbon footprint metrics for your digital products and services across your entire stack (front end web applications and server infrastructure).

• An article from DevOps.com on Tools for Sustainability in Cloud Computing gives a round up on what Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services offer for measuring and reporting carbon emissions on their platforms.

• With another hot summer looming in the US, Inside Climate News reports on HeatRisk, a new tool that could forecast potentially threatening heat, up to a week in advance: Plug in your zip code to get your forecast and advice relating to it.

• The 2024 AI Index report is out - with a whole new chapter on AI’s impact on science and medicine. This chapter makes little mention of AI’s environmental impact, although one of the key takeaways from the report is the “unprecedented” scale of the compute (measured in $) necessary to train frontier AI models.

• The student driven 2024 Planetary Health Report Cards are out, with 78% of schools that completed a previous report showcasing improvements in how planetary health is integrated into their schools.

What we’re watching

• Weathersight is on a mission to communicate climate change by providing reliable and comprehensive information about weather patterns across the globe. Check out its breaking anomalies.

• A deep dive into how the world’s largest health information system, DHIS2, is integrating climate data into its platform. It includes a use case from Rwanda.

What we’re reading

• This paper demonstrating the impact of extreme weather events on healthcare utilisation and mortality in the United States, and the importance of tracking these outcomes for adaptation purposes.

• This paper establishing a link between heat exposure and kidney disease progression.

• This viewpoint in the Journal of Infectious Diseases calling for the mobilisation big data from a ‘continuum of surveillance’ across environmental, animal and human health, to drive adaptation to climate change’s infectious disease impact.

• This literature review in The Lancet Microbe summarises the latest evidence on the impact of climate change and natural disasters on fungal infections.

• This article from Environmental Research examines the data driving early warning systems around climate sensitive infectious diseases, and the different models used to harness this data.

Events

• The launch of the 2024 Lancet Countdown in Europe report is happening on May 13th. Register for the webinar here.

• The DHIS2 annual conference is happening 10th to 13th June -registration is now open, attendance at the online component of the conference is free of charge.

• Forecasting Healthy Futures Global Summit is happening June 18th to 20th in Baku, Azerbaijan. You can register to attend virtually or in person, and travel awards are available.

Opportunities

• The World Health Organisation has launched a free, self paced e-learning course on climate and health.

• The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare offers tools, resources, a short course and in house expertise to help you estimate and analyse your carbon footprint.

And finally, check out the latest edition of BRANCH magazine.

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