SHADE Newsletter 5th September 2024

Welcome to the twenty first 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 two hot research topics in the SHADE space. We take a sweep through funding, food banks, communities of practice and strategic investments for health system resilience and check in on climate change policies that work. We listen to the lowdown on hyperscalers’ sustainability and AI for planetary health, check out the new AI risk repository and examine the latest on mapping air pollution, benchmarking climate change mitigation scenarios, recovering the ecological knowledge base of Indigenous health systems 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 hot topics: health co-benefits of climate change mitigation and early warning systems.

• Four papers on how best to mitigate climate change whilst maximising the health co-benefits: Firstly, this paper, from the Lancet Planetary Health, reviews co-benefit studies between 2010 and 2023. Secondly, this paper from the Lancet Regional Health (Western Pacific) in July 2024 looks at the co-benefits to cardiovascular health from climate change mitigation. Thirdly, this recent paper from China looks specifically at health co-benefits achieved through carbon mitigations that optimised air quality. Finally, this preprint is a very recent systematic review of quantitative studies.

• Three papers on early warning systems for hazards associated with climate change: First for desertification, second (a preprint) for flooding in low resource areas and third for landslides.

News

• The CSID Network launches: A new Community of Practice at the nexus of open source software, climate and infectious disease.

• The World Bank has published a framework for Strategic Investment for Health System Resilience. This prioritises interventions that prevent a public health threat from developing in the first place (layer 1), limit its spread should one merge (layer 2) and manage a widespread crisis (layer 3). The publication illustrates the relatively low cost that may be involved in addressing the weakest parts of these three layers.

• As Science exposes the barriers to funding research into the effects of climate change on human health in the US, funding for computing projects to reduce the carbon footprint of the ICT lifecycle does appear to be flowing: The US National Science Foundation is giving $36 million through the Expeditions in Computing program. One of the beneficiaries is Carbon Connect: An ecosystem for sustainable computing. This consortium of seven US universities is rethinking computing infrastructure for sustainability and AI. However, as their white paper makes clear, along with achieving accurate carbon accounting and quantifying rebound effects, they intend to ‘support rapidly growing capabilities and applications such as AI’. Meanwhile Nature reports on a paper taking a different approach to sustainability and AI - using AI to examine what climate change policies actually work.

• As studies reveal the climate benefits of food banks, tech platforms are allowing ‘virtual food banking’ to take off which further lowers emissions and raises the proportion of fresh produce in redistributed food.

What we’re listening to

• AI for Public and Planetary Health - Climate Change AI interview Dr Sara Khalid.

• The latest episode of the Environment Variables podcast takes an in depth look at the recent stories on the claims and the reality of hyperscalers’ sustainability, as well as the trials, tribulations and potential successes of the those trying to make them more transparent.

• The latest episode of the GreenIO podcast asks if the data centre industry can become circular.

What we’re reading

• A paper in Atmospheric Pollution Research, mapping air pollution in Great Britain at a high resolution over almost two decades, has the potential to make significant contributions to future research on the short and long term health impacts of exposure to air pollution.

• Co-authored by SHADE’s won Gabby Samuel, this paper in Human Brain Mapping looks at measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI).

• A comprehensive modelling study helps establish a new benchmark in climate change mitigation scenarios. The study doesn’t resurrect hopes of keeping 1.5 alive, but there’s a chance for staying below 1.6 degrees of warming.

• This modelling study in the Lancet Public Health highlights the anticipated increases in the already substantial regional disparities in temperature related mortality across Europe, based on current climate policies.

• Jessica Morley provides three well articulated reasons why AI shouldn’t be seen as a silver bullet for the challenges facing the UK’s NHS. But AI’s environmental impacts are not mentioned.

• Meanwhile environmental harms are covered in the AI Risk Repository: The paper preprint outlines the foundation for what the authors describe as ‘a more co-ordinated, coherent and complete approach to defining, auditing and managing the risks posed by AI systems’.

• Perspectives on connecting climate change and health in the Scandinavian Journal of Public Health looks at the complex relationship between climate change and health and calls for more interdisciplinary research.

• Epistemicide, health systems and planetary health: Re-centering Indigenous knowledge systems. This opinion piece from PLOS Global Public Health argues that a homogenisation of knowledge reduces our resilience, and we need to recover the ecological knowledge base of Indigenous health systems.

• This paper from Nature quantifies the carbon emissions from the 2023 Canadian wildfires, noting the implications of the findings for the carbon uptake potential of Canadian forests.

Events

• Our Planet, Our Health: 2025 Climate Action Convention takes place March 1st to 4th 2025 in Washington, DC and online.

• The DHIS2 Asia / Pacific Conference takes place in Da Nang, Vietnam between October 1st and 3rd. Discussion sessions include DHIS2 Climate and Health.

• Predicting: The future of Health? Register now for the September 11th launch of a report assessing the potential, risks and appropriate role of AI-powered genomic health prediction in the UK health system.

• Ensuring Sustainable Access to Effective Antibiotics. Anyone can register for the live stream of this event which takes place in New York between 5 and 7pm EST on September 22nd - the eve of the UN General Assembly meeting on AMR.

• The 4th International Conference on Public Health in Africa will be happening between November 26th and 29th in Rabat, Morocco. Calls for abstracts, side events and exhibitions are now open with a submission deadline of September 23rd. Conference tracks include digital innovation and AI as well as climate change and One Health.

Opportunities

• npj Digital Medicine has a call for submissions to a collection on Digital Health Solutions for Climate Resilience. Closing date for manuscript submission is September 30th.

• The African Journal of Bioethics has reopened its call for manuscripts. The deadline for submissions is September 16th.

• Do you conduct research using DHIS2? Come to an initial webinar at 13:00 CET on October 10th to launch the DHIS2 Research Forum.

• If you work for an organisation that delivers healthcare and social care services in Europe, consider joining Global Green and Healthy Hospitals which now has 2000 members across over 80 countries. Membership is free and gives you access to multiple online resources including guidance documents, case studies, webinars and an international platform for measuring your progress on reducing your environmental footprint.

• It’s not too late to contribute to the OECD’s public consultation on risk thresholds for advanced AI systems. The deadline is September 10th.

And finally, check out your city’s air quality over the past 170+ years.

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