SHADE Newsletter 8th May 2025

Welcome to the thirty seventh 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 will be coming out monthly from now on. It will continue to highlight selected topics, as well as providing a round up of new resources, events and opportunities in the SHADE space.

In this newsletter we turn the spotlight on surveillance and tools. 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].   

Surveillance

• In the case of Mpox, a ‘lack of interest in anything that is not transmitted from humans to humans in countries in the North contributed to a missed opportunity for early containment and prevention of its further spread’, says this article which calls for Setting-based surveillance and One Health

  in the Mpox response.

• Togo has automated its malaria risk mapping using DHIS2 to integrate climate data with health data. This is allowing it to respond more flexibly to changing climate factors. It’s not too late to register for the DHIS2 conference in Oslo from June 10th to 13th. Explore the agenda to find out more.

• With climate change a factor in increasing the likelihood of another pandemic, Nature India highlights an ‘actionable roadmap for transforming India’s fragile pandemic playbook into a resilient national framework’: Priority areas include a unified, open data ecosystem that extends to the private sector, a One Health approach and AI powered early warning systems..

• As Geographical reports on how climate change may fuel the spread of H5N1 bird flu, an article in Nature Communications highlights the recent advances in diagnosing and surveilling avian influenza virus more broadly. Along with calling for a One Health approach, the article highlights that to really get on top of the comprehensive environmental, animal, human and food product surveillance required, support for, and local labs in, resource-poor areas are required. Currently speedy diagnosis is impeded by insufficient computing power and internet access for data analysis, things that will be even more crucial as AI powered diagnostic tools emerge.

Tools

• This 2024 paper illustrated the linkage framework to reconstruct individual level exposures in cohort analyses of environmental risks. It made use of individual residential histories with related time periods, as well as high-resolution spatio-temporal maps of environmental exposures. This sample code tutorial now available on Github demonstrates how to do such a reconstruction.

• ‘What new ethics guidance cannot easily achieve is sharpening moral reasoning faculties and ensuring reflective engagement with ethical dilemmas’: This article from Nature Medicine presents the the PREPARED Case Study App for deep reflection on research ethics challenges during crises. The app comes from the EU funded project PREPARED, which is designing a framework to accelerate ethical research in times of crisis. You can also register for PREPARED’s final conference in Paris on June 3rd.

• ‘Drawing quantitative linkages between individual emitters and particularized harms is now feasible, making science no longer an obstacle to the justiciability of climate liability claims’: This paper in Nature lays out a new model to trace specific climate damages back to emissions from individual fossil fuel companies. Unlike earlier climate attribution models, this one doesn’t rely on total emissions in its calculations, but simulates emissions directly.

• Two items specifically for healthcare systems: Firstly, Navigating Climate Resilience: A GPS for Healthcare Systems. From the LIFE RESYSTAL project, this is a trio of tools to guide healthcare systems through climate adaptation. Secondly, the World Health Organisation and Health Care Without Harm are co-hosting an event to launch a new climate action tool on June 3rd. The meeting will be the first in a series of clinics that will provide practical action planning support for health systems striving towards low carbon sustainability. Find out more and register here.

• Github launches its Climate Action Plan for Developers: Explore over 60,000 green software and climate-focused repositories.

Resources, Events and Opportunities

• A modelling study in the Lancet Planetary Health shows the reduction in excess deaths from heat under different scenarios of incremental change in greenness. Specifically it estimates that ‘increasing vegetation cover by 10-30% could reduce the global population-weighted mean temperature during the warm season by 0.08-0.19°C, which in turn could prevent approximately 0.86-1.16 million deaths’.

• Urban and non-urban contributions to the social cost of carbon from Nature Communications looks at climate change’s economic impact, more usually reported at the global and country level. The study finds that the urban social cost of carbon (SCC) represents 78%-93% of the global SCC, due to both urban exposure and the urban heat island effect. This creates strong incentives for global cities, with their substantial leverage on climate policy at the national and global scales, to transition swiftly to a low-carbon economy. Meanwhile ‘Sitting ducks’: the cities most vulnerable to climate disasters from the FT looks at the known risk factors, as well as the data and modelling behind predicting vulnerability.

• 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 dry labs at the Institute of Cancer Research in London, there’s an internship opportunity. Contact [email protected] to find out more.

• 2024 to 2025 is the biggest year ever for the Planetary Health Report Card (PHRC), with over 1500 students at 188 schools in 21 countries taking part across medicine, pharmacy, nursing, occupational therapy, physiotherapy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, audiology, healthcare management, and nutrition and dietetics. 90% of schools with a previous report card improved their scores - read the full summary report here.

• This article from The New Stack highlights the environmental and other benefits of federated learning, which avoids the aggregation of user data in a central location. The article also describes the real world use of federated learning in healthcare.

• Multiple articles highlighting the Trump administration’s swinging cuts to publicly funded research into health and the environment. Nature highlights what this is doing to morale and the FT notes the silence on this, in public at least, from the private sector as well as many leading science bodies and individual scientists, but also the belief amongst some that the mood is shifting and resistance will be mobilised. Meanwhile, however, further unprecedented cuts are proposed for 2026.

• US Imperiled species and the five drivers of biodiversity loss: In this paper from BioScience, up to date analysis of data from multiple sources identifies climate change as posing the leading anthropogenically induced threat to US species listed on the Endangered Species Act, with 91% of these species affected.

• Linking up the findings from studies showing the ubiquity of microplastics and drug resistant microbes, as well as the build up of microplastics in the human body and, most recently, how drug resistant bacteria grow well on microplastics, this episode of the One World, One Health podcast asks Can Microplastics Spread Killer Bacteria?

• From IEEE Spectrum, We Need to Talk About AI’s Impact on Public Health looks at how data centre pollution is linked to asthma, heart attacks and more.

• From Data and Society, The Cloud is Dead, a series of essays exploring how communities have addressed the unequal power dynamics between technology production and deployment, and how tech impacts people’s everyday lives and the environment around them.

And finally, check out ChatUI-Energy, a gift from Hugging Face on Earth Day and get real time energy estimates for your chatbot conversations. Meanwhile Andy Masler gives the lowdown on the environmental impact of using ChatGPT and says don’t feel guilty about using it and Sasha Luccioni responds to one of the metrics he uses. .

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