Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
AI and Society, 2025 (ESCI, Scopus)
The growing planetary poly-crisis—marked by climate change, ecological degradation, and planetary health inequities—necessitates a fundamental transformation in healthcare systems. This paper examines the historical progression of health systems from public health to planetary health, where human well-being is understood within the limits of planetary boundaries. Planetary health provides a framework for sustainable health systems that reduce disease burden, optimize care delivery, and decarbonize healthcare operations. Within this context, artificial intelligence (AI) emerges as a transformative tool for addressing healthcare sustainability. AI applications offer significant potential to optimize resource use, improve preventive care, and enable circular economies in healthcare, thereby facilitating the transition toward planetary health. However, AI poses environmental challenges, including high energy consumption and resource-intensive development processes. To ensure its long-term viability, AI must align with sustainability principles by minimizing its ecological footprint while enhancing ecological integrity and social justice. This paper contributes to the literature in three key ways: (1) it briefly outlines the evolution of health systems toward planetary health, contextualizing the role of sustainability; (2) it presents emerging AI applications that support healthcare sustainability within the planetary health paradigm; and (3) it applies a structural–ethical approach—building on the work of Bolte and van Wynsberghe—to situate AI within the broader socio-technical, institutional, and ecological systems of healthcare, moving beyond second-wave AI ethics’ focus on isolated artifacts and design-level principles. By positioning AI as both a solution and a subject of scrutiny, this study advances the discourse on AI’s potential for planetary health while critically examining its alignment with long-term sustainability goals.