SHADE Newsletter 31st October 2024

Welcome to the twenty fifth 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 ongoing entanglements of health, tech and the environment with the fossil fuel industry. We take a sweep through the latest on biodiversity and the energy demands of AI, check in on some of hottest hospitals in the world, take a look at a new approach to health research ethics and catch up with Mpox, Oropouche, DNA data storage, tech regulation 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 the fossil fuel industry

• The 2024 report of the Lancet Countdown on health and climate change was published yesterday. The report finds that 10 of the 15 indicators monitoring the health threats from climate change have reached concerning record high levels. The report highlights that “While people in every country face unprecedented health threats from the changing climate, continued investment in fossil fuels and lagging funding for action to protect health persist”.

• Health Policy Watch reports on how fossil fuel subsidies (and political will) are blocking efforts by the health sector to achieve greater impact on climate policies.

• Episode 47b of the Green I/O podcast looks at the elephant in the room for all big tech companies - ‘are their sustainability claims offset by the so-called enabled emissions?’. Enabled emissions are defined as ‘emissions that would have not been possible without the use of advanced technology’ and are perhaps best exemplified by Big Tech’s relationship with the fossil fuel industry. (If you have time, get in the zone beforehand with episode 47a).

• Behind the scenes at the COP16 nature summit, a fossil fuel transition pledge was left out of the summit draft agreement.

• Climate change ‘worsened all 10 deadliest weather events in past two decades’ says the World Weather Attribution group, 20 years after the first ‘attribution study’. With over 570,000 deaths from these 10 events, Dr Friederike Otto, the group’s co-founder says “If we keep burning oil, gas and coal, the suffering will continue.”

• The Lancet calls for COP29 to move from stalling to action, saying that the ‘biggest benefits to health will flow from dramatic cuts in fossil fuels, rapid transition to renewable energy, and wealthy countries providing much greater support to vulnerable countries’.

News

• Analysis from the Natural History Museum in London reveals that current conservation efforts are not adequately protecting the most critical ecosystem services on which six billion people depend.

• Despite biodiversity being even harder to measure than carbon emissions, this Nature article reports on progress to towards a biodiversity credit market, informed by the trials and tribulations of the carbon credit market. Perhaps this will answer concerns about greenwashing behind ‘nature positive’ as a slogan, raised recently by the FT.

• The FT reports on NATO warnings that Russia is ‘withholding’ vital climate data in the Arctic.

• Nature reports on possible solutions to AI’s energy crisis in the form of more energy efficient chips. But it notes that more energy efficient chips may just get used more. It highlights calls for the tech industry to get onboard in addressing the crisis and for transparency on AI models and their energy requirements to be enforced. Meanwhile, as Mistral launches smaller AI models for use on laptops and phones, could this be the beginning of a move towards more sustainable AI?

• In the deadly heat, Iraq’s hospitals have become the ground-zero battlefield in the country’s climate crisis, a report from a country whose cities are already some of the hottest in the world.

What we’re listening to

• The latest episode of the One World, One Heath podcast looks at Mpox: An evolving One Health problem with Nodar Kipshidze. Nodar is Senior Research Analyst at the One Health Trust and an expert in modelling techniques. See more from Nodar in this preprint for a modelling study to understand the drivers of continued mpox transmission in the US. Nature also has the very latest on mpox in Central Africa. 

What we’re reading

• The Ubuntu Way: Ensuring Ethical AI Integration in Health Research. This article in Wellcome Open Research is awaiting peer review. The authors include SHADE’s own Gabby Samuel. The article proposes new, Ubuntu inspired ethical guidelines for AI health research, the aims of which include better stewardship of the environment.

• Check out this repository of resources aimed at reducing the environmental footprint of AI.

• This article from the Northwestern University Law Review examines the relationship between regulation and innovation, interrogating the widely held belief that the US leads Europe on tech innovation because it imposes a less onerous regulatory burden. Rather than regulation, the article points to factors such as shallow and fragmented markets, lack of government funding initiatives and Europe’s more risk averse and failure intolerant culture. It also questions whether all tech innovation is necessarily to be desired.

• From Energy Transition, more on how AI is fuelling the climate crisis not solving it.

• From Interface a study on Chip Production’s Ecological Footprint: Mapping Climate and Environmental Impact.

• Using large scale data analysis this paper in Nature demonstrates that bureaucratic incentives can reduce crop burning and hence child mortality in South Asia. A Nature editorial highlights how this could help ‘clear the air’ in India and Pakistan.

• This paper in Nature could herald real world applications of DNA data storage. This could more sustainably address the scale of our AI fuelled data generation, which is currently pushing Big Tech towards nuclear energy.

• A paper in the Lancet, drawing on data from multiple sources, raises concerns that a new, more virulent Oropouche virus might be responsible for recent outbreaks. Opinion is divided as to how environmental changes may have contributed to this.

• Health impact of urban green spaces: a systematic review of heat-related morbidity and mortality from BMJ Open concludes that urban green spaces play a vital role in mitigating heat-related health risks.

Events

• From the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine: Implications of Artificial Intelligence-Related Data Center Electricity Use and Emissions: A Workshop on November 12th and 13th.

• Register for ‘What’s a Climate Solution, What Isn’t, and Why: An inside look at Project Drawdown’s new solutions assessment’ on October 30th at 1pm Eastern.

• Register for AI is Trash: The Environmental Externalities of Machine Learning Tools with Dr Anne Pasek on February 12th 2025, 12pm to 1pm Eastern.

Opportunities

• Climate and Health Award: Advancing climate mitigation solutions with health co-benefits in low- and middle-income countries. This Wellcome funding call offers between £500,000 and £2M per project, with funding duration between 2 and 4 years. Full details of the award to be published and applications open in the week commencing November 25th.

• Systems Thinking for Sustainability: This new, 6 week hybrid course starts on Monday, will take 2 to 4 hours per week and costs £950. .

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