For the Gulf, War Has an Ecological Price
The environmental cost of the Iran war is being paid by the systems that sustain daily life across the Gulf.
By Rumaitha Al Busaidi
During the initial 39 days of war, U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iran moved beyond oil depots to energy and petrochemical infrastructure and Iranian retaliatory strikes hit power, fuel, and desalination systems across the Gulf. More than 400 incidents carrying potential environmental risk have been documented across the region and the environmental consequences have widened with every new category of target.
Somewhere in the Gulf today, a desalination plant damaged by strikes is being assessed for structural and environmental contamination. The chemicals it needs to operate still arrive by sea, through a strait that has been effectively closed for two months. Families at the end of that chain do not track shipping indices or ceasefire terms. They turn on a tap.
Bushehr, Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant, has emerged as one of the most alarming flashpoints. Iran reports that it has been struck four times. The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned of a serious risk to nuclear safety. Qatar’s Prime Minister, who revealed that his government had simulated the effects of a Bushehr incident, put the consequences plainly: no clean water, no fish, no life. Gulf desalination plants are not designed to filter radioactive material. If contamination enters the sea, it enters the tap.
The environmental cost of this war is now embedded in the conditions of life across the Gulf. It is moving through contaminated waters, disrupted food systems, threatened desalination infrastructure, and ecosystems absorbing more stress than they were built to withstand.
Pollution from uncontrolled fires may enter soil and water, leach into groundwater, and be absorbed by crops. The war’s carbon footprint is accumulating alongside the visible destruction. Analysis of the first 14 days of fighting estimated more than 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent—more than the combined annual emissions of 84 nations. The largest share came from the destruction of civilian buildings, homes, schools, and hospitals. Burning fuel in storage and targeted depots added another major share. Methane leaks from damaged gas infrastructure, rerouted civilian aviation, and the fuel consumption of thousands of combat flights are contributing to an atmospheric burden that will outlast the fighting itself.
Reconstruction will deepen that burden further, as damaged infrastructure is rebuilt using concrete, steel, and other energy-intensive materials. These emissions are part of the same chain of damage already moving through water systems, ports, coastlines, and food supply chains.
Ecological damage does not respect borders or battlefields. After a strike sank an Iranian warship off Sri Lanka, satellite imagery documented a 12-mile oil spill, illustrating how quickly the geography of this war has expanded. Toxic smoke from burning fuel and petrochemical infrastructure has drifted across urban populations and into ecosystems along major migratory corridors.
Over Israel, where more than 500 million birds cross each spring along the African-Eurasian flyway, air defense systems have shot down cranes and pelicans after mistaking them for incoming drones.
Across the Gulf, the pressure extends from sky to sea. Smoke, pollution, repeated explosions, and sustained maritime disruption are placing additional strain on ecosystems already weakened by warming seas, salinity, and chronic contamination. These waters are home to the second-largest dugong population in the world after Australia who are now threatened.
By mid-March, the region’s food import pathways were already under strain, with scarcity and price increases of between 40 and 120 percent reported across the region. Roughly 20,000 seafarers on nearly 2,000 ships remain stranded on either side of the waterway, a situation the United Nations has described as unprecedented in the post-Second World War era. Even during pauses in bombing, ecological risks continue to accumulate as vessels remain trapped, consuming fuel, rationing supplies, and operating as potential sources of pollution in confined waters.
This conflict has exposed the water-energy-food nexus in its most immediate form. The Strait of Hormuz carries around a fifth of the world’s oil. Gulf states remain deeply dependent on food imports, with more than 70 percent of GCC food supplies moving through Hormuz. Freshwater production relies heavily on desalination, which in turn depends on continuous energy and a steady maritime flow of chemicals, spare parts, and operating inputs. When the strait closed, pressure fell on all three systems at once.
The environmental cost of this war is now embedded in the conditions of life across the Gulf. It is moving through contaminated waters, disrupted food systems, threatened desalination infrastructure, and ecosystems absorbing more stress than they were built to withstand.
The 1991 Gulf War remains the closest precedent and offers one measure of the cost ahead. The United Nations Compensation Commission processed claims seeking roughly $352.5 billion and awarded $52.4 billion in compensation, including more than $5 billion for environmental and public health damage. It established that environmental harm from armed conflict can be documented, valued, and compensated at scale.
Today’s damage is broader and more complex. The ecosystems now absorbing the burden of this war were already under strain from chronic pollution, water insecurity, and rising environmental pressures. The scale and spread of industrial targeting raise the prospect of a far more complex remediation challenge. The damage is still accumulating, and the question of who will bear the cost remains unresolved.
A temporary pause cannot stop pollution from moving through soil and sea, carbon from settling into the atmosphere, or ecosystems from unravelling under pressures that long predate this war and will long outlast it. The region’s ecology is recording the price of this conflict in real time. Future generations will live inside that record long after the battlefield falls silent.
Rumaitha Al Busaidi is an Omani climate strategist, policy advocate, and sustainability leader currently serving as Business and ICV Development Manager at Hydrogen Oman (Hydrom). She is also the Vice President of the Environment Society of Oman. She is a member of the Gulf Committee of the Rihla Initiative for Green Economic Growth.
Section: (rihla-initiative) Photo: IRNA