SHADE Newsletter 7th March 2024

Welcome to the eighth 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 recent studies on the health impacts of climate change. We get the latest on the ongoing revolutions in genomics, look at proposed AI governance models, listen to healthcare institutions around the world talk about what they are doing to address climate change, find out about about sustainability in open source software and in the private sector, discover a surprising win for AI over the human in carbon emissions 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 health impacts of climate change

• From the Lancet Planetary Health, a study investigating how climate change will affect the seasonality of mortality globally. This study has important implications for healthcare resource allocation.

• Using data on ‘inversions’ - an atmospheric event that increases air pollution levels but is not linked to human activity - allows researchers to make a causal link between air pollution levels and suicide rates.

• A scoping review on the use of machine learning tools to predict health risks from climate-sensitive extreme weather events highlights the potential in this area, but acknowledges the need for better data standards for climate change and health, and increased capacity to translate findings into public health interventions.

• USAID’s Finding the Signal Report looks at climate related health risks and how AI can help.

News

• Environmental or eDNA is causing a revolution in biodiversity monitoring. An upcoming project will test the potential of sampling eDNA in lakes to revolutionise how species can be surveyed through time. Meanwhile an ongoing series of revolutions in genome sequencing is facilitating an explosion in genomic diagnoses with AI predicted to play an increasing part in new sequencing solutions. These revolutions raise the question of how the exponential rise in demand for sequencing compares with the rate of reduction in sequencing’s carbon (and other) footprints. Is this a textbook example of the rebound effect?

• Mainstream media picks up on the threat to health posed by the growing use of AI in medical settings following publication of this review article in Radiology.

• The Brookings Institute argues for a distributed and iterative approach to AI governance.

What we’re listening to

• Case studies from healthcare institutions around the world who are pursuing sustainable, resilient and low carbon healthcare delivery, commissioned by Health Care Without Harm. (Scroll down to find the case studies).

• The Technically Human podcast talks to Tamara Kneese of the AIMLab about the environmental impacts of AI and how they fit into, and serve to illuminate, the wider pros and cons of AI.

• The latest edition of the GreenIO podcast looks at the overlap between open source and sustainability. The podcast explores open source hardware, highlights how cloud providers base their carbon calculations on billing data and looks at incentives for transparency and having tech sustainability labelling. It concludes with some good news about energy grid changes for sustainability.

What we’re reading

• Making up for missing data in assessing the climate impact of healthcare facilities.

• A call for the application of systems based data science approaches within a One Health framework to effectively assess antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from the Lancet Planetary Health: The paper calls for new integrations of big data streams, such as those from clinical, agricultural and environmental monitoring, to speed up our understanding of AMR and inform how we can most effectively respond to it.

• How sustainability is trumping cost in the world of enterprise IT, from Climate Action Tech.

• Machine learning helps get a handle on ammonia emissions from agricultural fertilisers. This is critical in maintaining food security as the climate changes, without incurring increasing emissions with their deleterious effect on human health.

• Direct comparisons of carbon emissions for humans and AI undertaking writing and illustrating tasks reveal surprising results.

Events

• CleanMed Europe 2024 will be happening online from June 3rd through June 7th.

• The Planetary Health Alliance Meeting is happening 16th to 19th April in Malaysia. You can register to attend online.

• The King’s Fund are hosting an in person Digital Health and Care Conference in London on July 17th. Ticket prices vary from £180 to £245 with further discounts available.

Opportunities

• Healthcare Without Harm Europe are seeking two communications officers to spread the message for sustainable healthcare. Deadline is 18th March.

• The Health Foundation imagines the net zero NHS of the future. Take a tour and get in touch with them if you’d like to bring this installation to your event or workplace.

• You can still sign up for the Green Software Foundation’s Carbon Hack 2024 which starts March 18th. It’s all about the Impact Framework project which measures the environmental impact of software. Training sessions are still available on March 13th.

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