The race to deploy artificial intelligence in medicine has ignored a critical cost, one that patients and communities now pay every day through environmental damage.
Alok Mishra, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, examined 47 studies where sustainability factored into healthcare AI projects. What he found were fragmented efforts. Well-meaning teams optimized single pieces of a much larger puzzle while missing the whole picture.
Meanwhile, climate disasters have begun straining health systems across Asia and Europe this year. Landslides, flash floods, melting glaciers, and punishing heatwaves all force hospitals to absorb new burdens. Mishra argues these events make environmental awareness central to how AI gets built and deployed in healthcare.
The core problem sits inside a concept researchers call Green AI. Making an algorithm energy efficient or housing it in a data center powered by renewables does not automatically make the technology environmentally sound. True sustainability demands a life-cycle assessment, tracking everything from raw material extraction and manufacturing through daily operation and eventual recycling.
Mishra draws a comparison to familiar consumer choices. A refrigerator carries an energy rating label. Airlines show passengers the carbon footprint of a flight and offer offsets. Healthcare AI lacks any equivalent transparency.
That blind spot persists partly because the tech industry guards information about energy consumption and data storage closely. Mishra acknowledges the secrecy makes meaningful assessment difficult.
As a result, he calls for a paradigm shift. The stakes have moved beyond politics and into lived experience. Communities now confront environmental consequences directly, and health systems carry the load.
His central challenge cuts to the heart of the moment: should society solve AI’s problems by building more AI? Mishra rejects that logic. Researchers, he insists, want artificial intelligence developed within sustainable limits so it can deliver genuine long-term benefit to society.
The path forward requires healthcare leaders and technology developers to stop treating environmental impact as an afterthought and start treating it as a design requirement.
