Ann Borda

Biomedical and health informatics has traditionally focused on human-centric clinical data to support individual patient care and health systems. However, contemporary health challenges driven by climate change, biodiversity loss, and ecological degradation demand an expanded paradigm that addresses interdependencies among human, animal, and environmental health. This editorial introduces a new JMIR Medical Informatics section called “Planetary Health Informatics”—an essential evolution extending informatics praxis beyond human health care and toward Earth’s interconnected systems. JMIR Medical Informatics is launching a call for papers for this new section dedicated to advancing planetary health informatics (PHI) theory, methods, and applications for a sustainable future shaped by humans’ impact on Earth. We invite authors to submit work that explores how PHI integrates species, ecosystem, and geophysical data to address critical global challenges, including metagenomic disease surveillance, climate-related hazard forecasting, environmental pollution monitoring, and health infrastructure decarbonization. By synthesizing broader ecological frameworks, we present a road map for transforming fragmented data streams into planetary-scale intelligence.

Contemporary artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, particularly those based on foundation models and released at scale, are globally entangled and made up of a complex array of interrelated actors, practices, and transnational flows of resources. The rapid pace at which AI systems are being developed and distributed, is driving significant societal and planetary transformations. While much of the international agenda around governing AI has converged around downstream matters of safe deployment and use, deeper systemic issues—including power concentration, uneven environmental costs, or the asymmetric extraction of data and labour by technology companies—remain contested and unresolved areas of debate. In this paper we centre these systemic challenges, and locate governance entry points aimed at fostering more just futures. We conceptualise contemporary large-scale AI as a sociotechnical ecology comprised of interrelated actors, practices, and asymmetrical resource flows. Using the lens of infrastructural inversion within social studies of infrastructure, we trace the actors involved in the making of AI technologies, their interdependences, and long-term infrastructural continuities that shape them. We argue that new AI models and systems are not unprecedented but are instead built upon and shaped by pre-existing infrastructures, entrenched market relations, and socio-historical patterns. By making visible the sites of accountabilities and technical and non-technical intervention in the AI ecology, we identify four governance imperatives for sustainable and equitable AI governance: (1) Decentralising AI infrastructure, (2) Advancing environmental and epistemic justice through pluriversal AI governance, (3) Instituting cross-border data and data work governance, and (4) Enhancing international coordination, participation and solidarity.

In this paper, we consider the concept of global digital citizenship, particularly as it applies to museums and cultural heritage sectors. In this perspective survey study, we explore current examples of how museums can adjust to the tenets of global digital citizenship that are necessary to navigate and participate in increasingly interconnected digital worlds and to collectively address global challenges. This paper provides a qualitative survey and discussion covering issues concerning open foundations, knowledge co-creation, digital equity and inclusion, and participatory innovation. In conclusion, there are untapped opportunities for museums (e.g., through audience participation and digital tools, especially with recent developments in artificial intelligence), but also constraints that must be considered (e.g., lack of funding, digital inequality, and ethical issues related to the use of AI).

In this paper, we consider the concept of global digital citizenship, particularly as it could apply to museums and cultural heritage sectors. In this perspective survey study, we explore current examples of how museums can adjust to the tenets of global digital citizenship that are necessary to navigate and participate in increasingly interconnected digital worlds and to collectively address global challenges. The paper provides a qualitative survey and discussion covering issues concerning open foundations, knowledge co-creation, digital equity and inclusion, and participatory innovation. In conclusion, there are untapped opportunities for museums (e.g., audience participation and digital tools, especially with recent developments in Artificial Intelligence), but also constraints that must be considered (e.g., lack of funding or digital inequality, not to mention ethical issues in the use of AI).

This paper discusses three case studies of early science museum-related websites in the 1990s and early 2000s, when web technology was still relatively new and evolving. The Virtual Museum of Computing (VMoC) was a completely virtual museum, originally produced in 1995 as part of the Virtual Library museums pages (VLmp), an international online museum directory within the WWW Virtual Library, adopted by the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The Science Museum in London was one of the first museums in the United Kingdom to have its own web server. The museum hosted an early meeting on web service provision by and for museums, concurrently with an exhibition on the Information Superhighway at the museum in 1995. Exhiblets were launched online in 1998. Ingenious was a multi-site digital collections transformation project, launched as a website in 2003. Virtual Leonardo and Leonardo’s Ideal City were two experiments conducted by the digital team of the Science and Technology Museum of Milan, between 1999 and 2001. The experiment consisted of the creation of a shared online 3D world, namely a reconstruction of the real museum in the first case and a completely imaginary world in the second case. This paper describes the above three case studies from the early World Wide Web and then draws some conclusions, from first-hand experience of developments at the time. We cover both the advantages and the challenges encountered by the various projects and illustrate why they did not necessarily become established, despite promising early results.

Background: Implementation challenges of digital health solutions (DHSs) comprise complexities of behavioural change, resource limitation, inertia in existing systems, and failure to include consumer preferences. Understanding the factors which contribute to successful implementation of DHS is essential. We report the development of an implementation strategy for Brain Tumours Online (BT Online), a digital supportive care platform for patients with brain tumours, their carers and healthcare professionals. Aim: To develop an evidence-informed implementation strategy for BT Online, considering the specific barriers and facilitators to implementing DHS for adults with a brain tumour and their carers and healthcare professionals. Methods: A rapid review methodology was used to summarise factors relevant to implementation of DHS for people affected by cancer. Themes from the review were supported by implementation guidelines for DHS and the combined evidence informed the implementation strategy. Each theme was matched with specific steps for implementing BT Online. Results: The rapid review identified 10 themes, namely, awareness of the new digital platform; institutional integration and support; data security, the quality, usability and accessibility of the platform; belief in the benefit of the platform; the need for holistic and tailored features; the timing of introducing the platform; engagement of healthcare professionals; and the re-definition of roles and workload. The themes were matched with 51 concrete implementation steps. Discussion: The purpose of the strategy was to minimise risk of implementation failure, consider the specific context of care and generate a reference framework to evaluate BT Online prior to upscaling to use outside the research context. Our method contributes a novel approach of developing an evidence-informed rigorous implementation strategy if existing implementation frameworks do not apply.

Driven by the existential threats of climate change to planetary health, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established a mandate for National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) to facilitate adaptation planning in low- and middle-income countries. However, the extent to which NAPs consider health risks, particularly those affecting maternal and child health in the adaptation planning process, remains unexplored. Employing the READ approach for document analysis, this study assesses the thoroughness with which these risks were considered during the development and implementation of NAPs in selected Asia-Pacific countries: Cambodia, Nepal, Sri Lanka, and Timor-Leste. The findings reveal health is consistently identified as a high-priority sector vulnerable to climate change. Cambodia, Nepal, and Timor-Leste prioritized maternal and child health issues. Consequently, these countries have outlined a broader gender-based approach in their NAP development and implementation processes, addressing some of the maternal and child health threats posed by climate change. The findings underscore the need for enhanced efforts to prioritize reducing maternal and child health risks associated with climate change through effective interventions in national adaptation planning. This need could be met through evidence generation based on the maternal and child health impacts of climate change in under-represented countries. Additionally, the future development and updating of NAPs should involve a more comprehensive and diverse representation of women from various cultural and geographic backgrounds to prioritize the protection of maternal and child health in the climate change policy discourse.

Responding to the rapid roll-out and large-scale commercialization of foundation models, large language models, and generative AI, an emerging body of work is shedding light on the myriad impacts these technologies are having across society. Such research is expansive, ranging from the production of discriminatory, fake and toxic outputs, and privacy and copyright violations, to the unjust extraction of labor and natural resources. The same has not been the case in some of the most prominent AI governance initiatives in the global north like the UK’s AI Safety Summit and the G7’s Hiroshima process, which have influenced much of the international dialogue around AI governance. Despite the wealth of cautionary tales and evidence of algorithmic harm, there has been an ongoing over-emphasis within the AI governance discourse on technical matters of safety and global catastrophic or existential risks. This narrowed focus has tended to draw attention away from very pressing social and ethical challenges posed by the current brute-force industrialization of AI applications. To address such a visibility gap between real-world consequences and speculative risks, this paper offers a critical framework to account for the social, political, and environmental dimensions of foundation models and generative AI. Drawing on a review of the literature on the harms and risks of foundations models, and insights from critical data studies, science and technology studies, and environmental justice scholarship, we identify 14 categories of risks and harms and map them according to their individual, social, and biospheric impacts. We argue that this novel typology offers an integrative perspective to address the most urgent negative impacts of foundation models and their downstream applications. We conclude with recommendations on how this typology could be used to inform technical and normative interventions to advance responsible AI.