SHADE Newsletter 6th March 2025

Welcome to the thirty third 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, taking an in depth look at selected topics, as well as highlighting new resources, events and opportunities in the SHADE space.

In this edition we highlight AI’s health and environmental impacts, mining and e-waste and Co-benefits. 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].   

Global, Local and Personal: AI’s health and environmental impacts

• Medical applications of AI have hitherto largely focussed on individual patient care. Artificial intelligence for modelling infectious disease epidemics, a perspective in Nature, considers the use of AI in public health, looking at the benefits AI and new data sets, including climate data, can bring. The piece highlights ‘key areas in which AI could provide either incremental or potentially transformative improvements in modelling epidemic dynamics’. However, it also notes that the ‘evaluation of the true value added by AI approaches is difficult, and should include often-overlooked considerations such as the environmental costs associated with training complex AI models’.

• The FT reports on how pollution from Big Tech’s data centre boom is costing US public health $5.4bn, noting that the race to develop generative AI will further exacerbate the situation. This report is based on research covered in the January 9th edition of this newsletter. The FT article includes responses to the research findings from Google, Microsoft and Meta.

• Following on from the last newsletter and its report on big data and AI models in medicine, two more reports giving insights into the scale of emerging models in this space: First an AI tool that combines six machine-learning models to diagnose multiple conditions from a single blood sample. Secondly, an AI model, Evo-2, trained on 128,000 genomes spanning the tree of life, from humans to single-celled bacteria. This data contains both ‘coding sequences’ — which carry instructions for making proteins — and non-coding DNA that includes sequences that can control when, where and how genes are active. This means Evo-2 differs from previous ‘protein language models’ as it can write DNA from scratch and ‘make sense of existing DNA, including hard-to-interpret ‘non-coding’ gene variants that are linked to disease’. Clearly both these models have huge potential for improving human health but it is worth noting that Evo-2 is the biggest ever Biology model baed on the computing power it requires.

• To understand where the appetites of AI, and computing more generally, may be taking us, a round up of recent articles: First up, How much energy will AI really consume? The good, the bad and the unknown from Nature. Secondly, from the Network for the Digital Economy and the Environment, Scoping the Energy and Environmental Impacts of Artificial Intelligence. This article provides a useful summary on where research is currently focussed as well as more neglected areas which include research on the indirect effects of the use of AI. Thirdly, following the publication of this study from Duke University, Alexander C. Kaufman reports on how the AI boom could be powered ‘without a bunch of new gas plants’. Finally, a paper from the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), which shows that recent reductions in per-device carbon footprints appear to be insufficient to close the sustainability gap. It concludes that a “concerted effort in which both the demand for electronic devices and the carbon footprint per device is significantly reduced on a continuous basis for the foreseeable future” is required to meet the Paris agreement.

Mining, urban mining and e-waste

• With copper supply crucial for the AI boom, the FT reports on the trials and tribulations of a copper mine in Panama. At the same time this paper from AIP Conference Proceedings suggests urban mining may play a part in the way forward: The paper highlights the reduced impacts on both the environment and human health compared with conventional mining practices as long as approaches such as ‘green electrolysis’ are adopted.

• It’s not just copper - lithium batteries are fundamental to our digital society, powering devices including portable electronics in healthcare. Debates rage about lithium mining in Europe as this episode of Euronews Tech Talks highlights. The next episode of the podcast looks at recycling and reconditioning lithium ion batteries.

• Meanwhile this article from Tech Xplore looks at Australia’s plans to address its e-waste problem by urban mining within its new circular economy framework. The article concludes with a timely reminder for consumers to repair and reuse their existing products where possible.

Co-benefits

• The impact of tree-based interventions in addressing health and wellbeing outcomes in rural low-income and middle-income settings: a systematic review and meta-analysis: This study from the Lancet Planetary Health provides crucial evidence for policymakers to plan effective interventions to protect nature and bring benefits to health.

• Also from the Lancet Planetary Health, a systematic review of co-benefits more generally - The public health co-benefits of strategies consistent with net-zero emissions: This ‘highlights the need for a standardised framework to assess and compare health impacts of climate mitigation actions across sectors and confirms that achieving net-zero goals supports far-reaching public health policies’.

• From Project Drawdown, We need synergies, not silos, to solve humanity’s greatest challenges. This insights paper looks at ‘triple win’ solutions at the nexus of climate, nature and human well-being.

Resources, Events and Opportunities

• This tool from the Digital Economy and the Environment (nDEE) searches a database of articles and resources on the energy and environmental impacts of the digital economy. You can use it to search for health related items.

• Check out Climahealth, the public face of the WHO-WMO Joint Climate and Health Programme, and explore resources, tools, topics and more to understand how climate change impacts health, and what can be done about it.

• The impact of climate change on vulnerable populations in pediatrics: opportunities for AI, digital health, and beyond—a scoping review and selected case studies from Pediatric Research. ‘This work underpins future explorations into leveraging AI to navigate and neutralize the burgeoning impact of climate change on pediatric health outcomes’.

• Internship opportunity at the Institute of Cancer Research in London: If you hold a master's degree, have a background in data science / software engineering and you would like to contribute directly to improving the sustainability of the ICR dry labs, contact [email protected].

• How to find climate data and science the Trump administration doesn’t want you to see from The Conversation.

• Share insights on the health risks caused by climate change in this global climate and health survey. The survey aims to identify climate-related health priorities in the most climate-vulnerable regions in the world. Find out more here.

• A call for papers on Advancing and integrating climate and health policies from the Journal of Climate Change and Health. Deadline for submissions is June 30th.

• The Forecasting Healthy Futures Global Summit is happening April 8th to 10th in Brazil. Register for in person or virtual tickets and submit abstracts or posters here.

• Do you want to amplify your conference, peer-reviewed research and policy article, event, job or virtual or in-person convening? Consider submitting it for inclusion in the Planetary Health Alliance newsletter which comes out monthly.

• Climate Impacts Awards: Unlocking urgent climate action by making the health effects of climate change visible. Wellcome ‘will fund transdisciplinary teams to deliver short-term, high-impact projects that maximise policy outcomes by combining evidence generation with influencing and engagement strategies’. Application deadline in April 30th.

• Give feedback on this prototype tool from Jo Lindsey Walton, designed to help assess the environmental sustainability of AI projects holistically.

• Listen to Will Alpine, formerly of Microsoft, telling how he was wrong about AI.

And finally, recycling is good, but it’s not the answer: What’s actually important if you want to reduce your carbon footprint? from Gus Bartholomew.

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