SHADE Newsletter 8th August 2024

Welcome to the nineteenth 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.

Following SHADE’s summer break, we have a bumper newsletter! We highlight extreme temperatures for the second time. We contrast news on the health research potential of the cloud with news on its environmental impact, take a sweep through urban mining, the rebound effect and systems thinking for sustainability, check in on ocean health and One Health, zoonotic diseases, the world’s largest Health Management Information System, the futility of chasing accurate carbon measurement and fungi’s role in managing data centre waste. We ask where responsibility should lie for the environmental impact of data intensive health research, explore preventative medicine from an ethical perspective, get the full digest on AI’s appetite for water and power, and find that generative AI fell short in predicting the sustainability or otherwise of its future.  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 Extreme Temperatures

• As the UN Secretary General calls for urgent action on addressing extreme heat and the Guardian reports that the extreme heat dome that hit the Paris Olympics would be ‘impossible’ without human caused global heating, Wellcome explains how extreme heat affects health.

• Antonio Gasparrini presents a collection, in Environmental Health Perspectives, showing how far research into the health impacts of extreme temperature has moved on, and Malcolm Mistry and Antonio Gasparrini develop a new framework that can enable real-time forecasting of temperature related excess mortality at a small scale. This forecasting would be invaluable to local public health authorities and emergency services. The framework is sufficiently computationally light to be deployed on a standard computer, making it suitable for areas with limited health resources as well as less environmentally impactful in itself.

• Meanwhile climate change presents forecasting with a new challenge: Nature reports on the increase in ‘fire clouds’ and how these can outwit current fire modelling systems, with fires spreading much faster than forecast.

• As Europe warms at twice the global average rate, the infographics for the Lancet Countdown Indicators give an overview of what this means.

News

• Exploiting the UK’s massive levels of e-waste, the Royal Mint has diversified from minting coins to urban mining. Using a low energy process, it is already extracting gold from e-waste, and looking to mine other materials such as aluminium and copper.

• Despite shelving £1.3bn of spending on tech and AI projects, the incoming UK government has unlocked £8m in match-funding after AWS provides £8m in cloud resources for UK Biobank. This will allow UK Biobank to further scale up its data and have access to machine learning and AI capabilities to facilitate research into diseases like dementia, Parkinson’s, diabetes and cancer. Meanwhile the cloud is in the news for the wrong reasons as the Guardian reports that Ireland’s data centres consumed more electricity last year than all of its urban homes combined, and that anger is mounting over the environmental costs of a planned Google datacentre in Uruguay.

• An upbeat article from New Scientist on how to ‘supercharge the race to net zero’ with low tech means that don’t involve, for example, lithium ion batteries and the adverse environmental impacts they bring.

• As Nature reports on the latest development that could make AI more efficient, Jevons Paradox, aka the Rebound Effect, is in the news: The director of the Green Software Foundation argues that it shouldn’t stop attempts to make software more efficient, and the London Interdisciplinary School are conducting a webinar to explore how systems thinking clarifies the paradox, and in so doing has the potential to revolutionise sustainability (see more under ‘Events’ below).

What we’re listening to

• Two Rare Earth episodes from the BBC: One reports on oceans and climate change and another on the rise in global wildfires.

• AI’s Power Problem - this episode from the Environment Variables podcast also includes a discussion on the use of fungi to manage building waste in data centres.

• Asianometry gives the detailed lowdown on The Big Data Centre Water Problem, and CNBC report on the massive power draw of generative AI.

What we’re reading

• Responsibility for the Environmental Impact of Data-Intensive Research: An Exploration of UK Health Researchers from SHADE’s own Gabby Samuel.

• An interesting retrospective on the rollout of DHIS2, the world’s largest Health Management Information System, in Portuguese speaking African countries. It describes how technical challenges have been overcome and how the platform is increasingly looking to integrate climate and weather data and so support initiatives such as Early Warning Systems for diseases and other One Health projects.

• Two papers on emerging zoonotic diseases, an increasing risk due to climate change amongst other factors: Firstly, Realising a global One Health disease surveillance approach: insights from wastewater and beyond. This paper explores a wastewater surveillance system to address emerging zoonotic diseases. Secondly, A One Health Framework for exploring zoonotic interactions demonstrated through a case study: Data from Austria between 1975 and 2022 is conceptualised in a ‘zoonotic web’ using network analysis in a One Health framework. This new approach illuminates the role of climate change amongst other risk factors, and offers insights into zoonotic transmission chains which could help local strategies against zoonoses.

• Environmental sustainability and the paradox of prevention, from the Journal of Medical Ethics, explores preventative medicine from an ethical perspective.

• India’s census has now been delayed for 3 years and counting: Old fashioned data collection by census underpins the quality of other surveys, including those on health and migration, both of which are heavily impacted by climate change.

• Marine scientists call for One Health to be reframed to include ocean health as climate change, and human activities generally, mean ocean health is failing and more data is urgently required. (See also ‘what we’re listening to’ above).

• Shaping the Future of Healthcare: Integrating Ecology and Digital Innovation: A mixed methods study from Southern Italy.

• Scott Logic asks if we can get to Generative AI 2.0 before the environment pays too high a price for the current ‘brute-forced AI gold rush’.

• Rethinking digitalisation and climate: don’t predict, mitigate from npj Climate Action exposes the false assumptions behind attempts to measure the carbon footprint of digital, and how uncertainty literature can provide an alternative way forward for climate mitigation.

Events

• Climate-resilient and sustainable health systems in Africa: Register to join this virtual session focussed on primary health care in Ghana at 10am UK time on August 14th.

• Rethinking Sustainability: Insights from Systems Thinking: The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) is running this webinar on August 14th, 6pm to 7pm UK time. Sign up here.

• The first ever Climate and Health Africa Conference takes place in Zimbabwe October 29th to 31st. Fortunate Machingura tells the story behind her chairing the conference.

• Dr. Sasha Luccioni will be delivering a keynote at the latest workshop in the series on Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning, happening at NeurIPS 2024 on the 14th or 15th December (TBD).

• Earth Friendly Computation: Applying Indigenous Data Lifecycles in Medical and Sovereign AI. This session is taking place at the Pacific Symposium on Biocomputing, happening in Hawai’i between January 4th and 8th 2025.

Opportunities

• The Green Web Foundation has a goal of reaching a fossil free internet by 2030. It has launched a newsletter - sign up here.

• Check out all the resources on Health Care Without Harm Europe’s new website.

And finally, find out how your city will feel in the future.

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