Climate Health Informatics - Chethan Sarabu (Cornell Tech) - April 2, 2026

Healthcare is simultaneously a responder to climate change and a contributor to it. As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in clinical decision-making, patient communication, and operational workflows, it introduces a new dimension to this paradox: care now carries a computational and environmental footprint. This talk introduces Climate Health Informatics - an emerging discipline at the intersection of clinical informatics, environmental exposure science, and AI governance - focused on designing health systems that improve outcomes without externalizing harm to planetary health. We will explore how digital care changes responsibility boundaries, why current evaluation frameworks fail to capture sustainability impacts, and how the SAHAI (Sustainably Advancing Health AI) framework provides a practical pathway for deploying AI that is clinically effective, operationally trustworthy, and environmentally accountable. Through real clinical and health-system use cases - including patient-facing AI, ambient documentation, and decision support - the session will demonstrate how informatics infrastructure can simultaneously advance patient care, clinician trust, and climate resilience.