During the night of 7–8 March, Israel struck four oil facilities inside and around Tehran, as part of broader attacks on more than 30 energy infrastructures across Iran. Thick black toxic smoke covered the city, while soot and pollutants returned to the ground as “black rain,” entering drainage systems amid fears of contamination of both surface and groundwater in a metropolis of over nine million people.
A few days later, the environmental damage of the war appeared thousands of kilometres away from the main battlefield, near the coast of Sri Lanka. The torpedoing of the Iranian frigate Dena by US forces caused a 20-kilometre-long oil spill, threatening ecologically sensitive coastal zones, with Sri Lankan authorities already beginning sampling and cleanup operations.
These are only two of more than 300 critical environmental incidents recorded within the first 11 days of the war across 12 countries in the wider region by the Conflict and Environment Observatory (a UK-based NGO). Of these, 232 had already been assessed for their environmental risk. According to the same data, the most frequent targets were military infrastructure, while at least 12 commercial vessels had been hit in ports or in the Persian Gulf by 11 March, when around 150 oil and LNG tankers were anchored at the start of the US operation “Epic Wrath.”
Tons of Carbon Dioxide
In just the first two weeks after its outbreak, the war produced more than 5 million tones of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e), a figure exceeding Iceland’s average annual emissions. This is shown in a recent analysis by the US-based progressive climate and economic think tank Climate and Community Institute.
Nearly 50% of CO₂e emissions came from destroyed homes, buildings, and infrastructure, while almost 1.8 million tones were attributed to fuel burned in oil tanks, facilities, and tankers.
Speaking to To Vima, Patrick Bigger, executive director of the Climate and Community Institute and lead author of the analysis, described conflicts in the Middle East as “a critical intersection between geopolitics and geoeconomics.” As he notes, “unprovoked military attacks targeting energy infrastructure are absolutely a form of climate destabilization.”
The precedent of Ukraine is revealing. According to Bigger, Russian attacks generated huge unexpected profits for US fossil fuel companies through the expansion of the LNG market. These profits, he says, “are being reinvested into new extraction and new production worldwide.”
In theory, he adds, Europe should already have understood that “energy security can only be ensured through major investments in renewable energy sources.” However, he warns that “not all countries will learn this lesson, and certainly not the current US administration,” which, in his view, will use high prices as a pretext to further expand fossil fuel production, thereby deepening climate destabilization.
The Enduring Question
A persistent issue remains not only the scale of environmentally harmful emissions from armed conflicts, but also the fact that they are institutionally underreported. As Bigger stresses, “military emissions were deliberately excluded from the accounting methodologies of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change as early as the 1990s,” while even today “there is no universally accepted methodology for assessing emissions in wartime.”
This means the real climate footprint of conflicts is often calculated retrospectively by independent researchers rather than through a coherent international accountability system. For him, more data is useful only if it leads to meaningful action: “Documentation would only make sense if its purpose were to assign responsibility for ecocide and for the climate damage caused by aggressive wars.”
The debate, therefore, is not only about scientific measurement of war, but also about whether its environmental damage will ever acquire real legal and diplomatic weight.
At this point, the intervention of Theodota Nantsou, Head of Environmental Policy at WWF Greece, gives the issue its clearest political dimension. Speaking to To Vima, she describes “a human tragedy, but also an ecological catastrophe of global scale, with consequences that will last longer than the conflict itself,” and characterizes the bombing of fossil fuel facilities as an “environmental crime.”
Her observation gains further weight when placed alongside Ukraine. Three years of war have already been associated with approximately 237 million tones of CO₂e, a quantity comparable to the annual emissions of Belgium, Ireland, and Austria combined, with an estimated social cost of around $43 billion.
For Nantsou, the two wars on Europe’s periphery demonstrate that dependence on hydrocarbons is simultaneously a source of conflict, instability, geopolitical dependence, and environmental destruction. “Decarbonization,” she stresses, “is a recipe for peace, but also an urgent necessity for stability, energy security, and environmental protection.”
