West Asia’s war is already an environmental disaster

The bombs, the stranded ships and LPG shortages have made it to the headlines. The acid rain, the oil spills and the carbon cost of rerouting ships remain hidden in plain sight.

Four weeks ago, the US and Israel launched airstrikes on Iran. Since then, much of the world’s attention has been consumed by oil prices, geopolitics and the terrifying question of how far this conflict might escalate.

But there is another story unfolding whose echoes will probably reverberate for longer.

Oil prices may correct once the Strait of Hormuz opens up, but the contaminated water and soil will take decades to recover, if at all they do. The environmental consequences of this war are already crossing borders, contaminating oceans, disrupting long term energy transition strategies and pumping enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

This piece is an attempt to map out the short-term environmental damage that is already visible and why we should all care about it.

Black skies over Tehran

Let’s start with the obvious. The most visceral images from the war so far have been of the sky over Tehran turning black. And then literally pouring toxic liquid over the city.

On March 7-8, Israeli strikes hit four major oil storage facilities and a distribution centre in and around Tehran. Unrefined oil leaked into the streets, fires raged for days and then it rained. The rain was black. Tehran residents reported an oily, dark residue coating their cars, windows and skin. Iran’s Red Crescent warned that the rain was “highly dangerous and acidic” and could cause chemical burns and serious lung damage.

Here’s the science behind it. When crude oil burns, especially “sour” crude that is rich in sulphur, it releases sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide into the atmosphere. These gases react with moisture in the air to form sulphuric acid and nitric acid. When it rains, that acid comes down with the water. Add in the soot and the particulate matter, you have a toxic cocktail falling from the sky onto a city of 10 million people.

Even when it does not rain, the pollutants remain suspended in the air for days. Tehran’s geography makes things worse. The city sits in a basin surrounded by the Alborz mountains, which frequently results in a phenomenon called temperature inversion – a layer of warm air sitting above cool air near the surface. The pollutants released near the surface get trapped in the cool layer and are unable to disperse. It is the same phenomenon that makes Delhi smoggy, except in Tehran, the pollutants aren’t from just traffic.

The water, soil and food

The air pollution is visible – you can see the black skies in photographs. What is harder to see, but potentially more enduring, is the contamination seeping into soil and water.

Michael Oppenheimer, a Princeton climate scientist, points out that oil can seep into the ground and contaminate streams, rivers and reservoirs. In a region as arid as Iran, where water is already scarce, polluting what little surface water exists is a death sentence. The contamination is also reaching agricultural areas. Particles from the fires can produce toxins that end up in the soil and get taken up by crops.

Perhaps the cruellest dimension is that Iran was already dealing with severe environmental stress – drought, rising temperatures, desertification, and dying wetlands. The war has layered new damage on top of existing vulnerabilities.

Oil spills in the ocean

While the world watches oil prices, oil is actually spilling into the ocean.

The Conflict and Environment Observatory has documented at least 12 merchant ships struck in ports or in the Persian Gulf since the conflict began. The most striking case though was far from there – IRIS Dena, the Iranian vessel torpedoed by a US submarine off the coast of Sri Lanka on March 4. Oil patches appeared along the Hikkaduwa coast, a popular tourist area and ecologically sensitive zone, three days after the sinking.

In the Persian Gulf itself, the risks are compounding. Electromagnetic jamming has disrupted vessel navigation and communication systems, increasing the risk of accidental collisions and spills in already congested waters.

The Persian Gulf hosts the world’s second-largest dugong population, heat-adapted coral communities and over 700 fish species. If oil spills, it doesn’t disperse easily in the enclosed, shallow Gulf. It coats mangrove forests that serve as fish nurseries, smothers coral reefs and poisons the food chain.

Oil spilled in the Gulf during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s was linked to the near-total annihilation of the region’s hawksbill sea turtle population and the destruction of a major portion of its green turtles.

Carbon cost of rerouting

So what happens when the Strait of Hormuz remains shut? Well, the cargo has to find an alternate route. And it is not just the Strait of Hormuz route that is impacted.

Europe-Asia shipping normally uses the Suez Canal route through the Red Sea. These ships don’t pass through Hormuz at all. But the broader West Asia instability, particularly the threat of renewed Houthi attacks in the Red Sea, which Iranian-linked forces have carried out before, is pushing those ships to reroute around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope too.

UNCTAD estimates that a round trip from Singapore to northern Europe via the Cape of Good Hope produces 70% higher emissions than the Suez canal route. A 2024 modelling study found that Suez Canal disruption increases shipping carbon footprints by nearly 50%.

The same applies to aviation. The Iranian airspace is completely closed and the Gulf airspace has been closed, on and off, to civilian aircraft. Flights are being rerouted, which means longer routes, more flying time and eventually more fuel burnt and more emissions.

Dirty choices

The energy shock from this war is pushing many countries backwards on the journey towards cleaner fuels.

In India, the LPG crisis is perhaps the most striking. India imports roughly 67% of its liqueified petroleum gas, and about 90% of those imports transit the Strait of Hormuz. With the strait effectively closed, commercial LPG supply has reduced. Restaurants across the country are considering switching to coal and firewood.

India’s environment ministry has actually advised state pollution control boards to permit the use of these dirtier fuels in a direct reversal of the government’s decade-long push under the Ujjwala Yojana scheme to move 104 million of India’s poorest households from firewood and cow dung to LPG. As Dainik Jagran put it, “A foreign war they had no part in, conducted through a strait they have never seen, has reached directly into their kitchens and extinguished the flame that a government scheme lit for them.”

The pattern extends well beyond India. The Philippines is ramping up coal-fired power generation to counter soaring LNG costs. Australia said it would temporarily loosen fuel quality standards to boost available supply.

Carbon emissions from the war

War itself is a carbon emitter. The world’s militaries collectively have a bigger carbon footprint than all but three countries. Research on the Gaza conflict found that just the first 120 days produced more emissions than 26 individual countries do in an entire year.

The Iran war involves submarine operations, long-range bomber sorties and missile defence systems. The emissions bill will be staggering.

The post-dated bill

We have real-time dashboards tracking oil prices, casualty counts, and missile trajectories. We don’t have a single live tracker for the tonnes of toxins settling into Tehran’s groundwater, or the hectares of ocean landscape being destroyed in the Gulf. The things we measure are the things we act on.

The environmental cost of this war is not being measured, and so it will not be acted on, until the bill arrives, decades from now, in the form of cancers, dead fisheries and barren soil.

But by then, the war will be a Wikipedia article and we will all be dead.

Sailee Rane leads the strategy for Ecosystem messaging at Rainmatter foundation and run the Youtube channel The Climate Brief. This article first appeared on her Substack Sunny Climate, Stormy Climate.