You walk into a forest and there’s that deep, woody, earthy smell that just hits you. The fog, the dampness and that cool mist in the morning, and your senses pick them up immediately without you having to try. The air around you right now is doing the same thing. It could be your room, an air freshener you sprayed or just that heavy summer heat in the air. Whatever it is, the air is always giving you a sense of what’s around you.

But think about it on a bigger scale. That air didn’t just appear. It has been moving, over oceans, over deserts, through cities and over open fields. It has passed over places that are green, alive and beautiful. And it has also passed over dirty places, neglected ones and some that are literally burning.

Burning could mean wildfires, but it also includes places where wars are taking place. War is the most heinous crime on earth and should never happen in any way. It doesn’t just kill people. It destroys everything around them, too! The roads, the hospitals and the schools, all gone or damaged. Businesses shut down. Families fall apart. People who survived the bombs now can’t find work, can’t afford food and can’t access a doctor. The whole system, the everyday life, just collapses. And rebuilding takes not years, but generations.

For the past few decades, the severe effects of climate change on Earth is impossible to ignore; the heat is rising and things are not going back to normal. And now with the wars and bombardment in Palestine, Lebanon, Iran and the whole Middle East, things are just getting messier and going out of hand.

War doesn’t just destroy cities. Some of its worst effects travel quietly, through the air we breathe

Bombing and explosions do enormous damage to the environment. Ecosystems get destroyed and oil fields catch fire. All of this pumps more and more carbon into the air. The whole system that keeps life going on this planet is slowly breaking down. Humans, animals, plants, the soil under our feet, the water we drink and the air we breathe — all are suffering. None of this is winning anyone anything. The ones causing the destruction are not safe either.

What actually burns in a war?

In a regular house fire, it is wood, plastic and fabric that burn. The smoke is really bad, but it’s basically organic stuff: carbon, mostly. Your body can deal with ‘some’ of that. War is different. In wars, a fuel depot may get hit, a factory catches fire or military vehicles burn. Here, we are not dealing with wood and basic stuff anymore. The stuff in these includes plastics, heavy metals, industrial chemicals, rubber and electronics — things that were designed to ‘not to catch fire’, so when they do, what comes off them is seriously dangerous.

The scientific term for these particles is PM2.5: particulate matter that’s smaller than 2.5 micrometres. For comparison, a human hair is about 70 micrometres wide. Imagine how minuscule these particles can be; you can’t see them with your naked eye and a regular cloth mask basically does nothing to stop them from entering your respiratory tract. They go straight into your body and start irritating your lungs before you even know it.

Children and the elderly are more vulnerable and the damage is not immediately visible; it builds up silently. By the time a child starts coughing more than usual or gets tired too quickly, it is evident that their lungs just don’t work as well as they should; the harm was already done a long time ago.

The atmosphere has no checkpoints

When a massive fire starts, say, an oil refinery gets bombed and fire erupts, the heat doesn’t only push smoke sideways. It pushes it up, way up, high enough to reach what’s called the ‘jet stream’ (the term used in aviation), which is essentially a fast-moving river of air that circles the planet at high altitude. Once smoke gets up there, it can cover hundreds of kilometres in a single day.

Organisations like Nasa and the Conflict and Environment Observatory, track these plumes using satellites. During the early years of the war in Ukraine, when fuel depots were being hit, researchers could watch the resulting smoke clouds drift across the Black Sea and affect air quality in Turkey and Georgia. Not metaphorically, measurably. The numbers in those countries actually changed.

This is why even those countries that have no involvement in any conflict can wake up and see the sun looking pale orange or smell something faintly chemical in the air. It’s the effects of someone else’s war that quietly arrives at their doorstep.

Soot changes more than just the air

When you wear a black shirt in summer, many of you feel hot. And if you change to a white one, you immediately feel better. Why? Because black absorbs heat while white reflects it. The same thing happens in the sky. When war fills the air with black carbon, basically soot from burning fuel and chemicals, it acts the same way a black shirt does. It is the same physics but on a far bigger scale.

However, in the case of a shirt, you had the option to change, but in the case of the sky and environment, unfortunately, you alone cannot change them. That soot comes back down and falls on land, snow, ice, glaciers and mountain tops. Once soot covers snow or ice, it stops reflecting sunlight the way it normally would and starts soaking up heat instead. This causes it to melt way faster than it naturally should. For millions of people who depend on glacier and mountain snow as their only source of drinking water or water for agriculture, this is nothing short of a disaster.

When rain becomes a problem

Clean rain is one of the healthiest natural blessings. It rinses everything, fills rivers and gets absorbed in the ground. But when fuel depots catch fire, military equipment melts and factories burn, the air is then filled with sulphur and nitrogen. And when the rain falls, it picks these harmful chemicals up on the way down.

So what reaches the ground is not really clean rain. It arrives carrying something it shouldn’t. And that small contamination, over a few seasons, starts showing in the soil. Trees struggle to grow, lakes and ponds turn hostile to fish — they stop reproducing and smaller creatures also disappear. Recently, when it rained around various parts of the country, you might have heard your parents restricting you from playing or going out in the rain, because this was the main concern.

Blocked light, smaller harvests

Plants thrive in sunlight. That’s basic biology. What’s less obvious is how much difference even a small reduction in sunlight means to agriculture. Where there is heavy fighting, the air above becomes full of smoke and dust for months. That haze stays between the sun and the ground like a dirty sheet. The sunlight that gets through is weaker than it should be. Studies have found this can cut solar radiation by 10 to 20 percent in conflict areas.

Now that sounds like a small number until you think about what it means for a farmer. A farmer’s crops still grow, just not enough. And in farming, not enough is not a small problem. That 10 percent difference can be the line between a family eating properly and a family going short.

War’s damage doesn’t stay where the war is taking place. Right now, because of the conflict involving Iran, the Strait of Hormuz, the single most important oil route in the world is blocked. Pakistan is already facing the results. Fuel price has shot up. And when fuel goes up, everything becomes more expensive — flour, rice, vegetables, transport, local bus fare and the electricity bill. The war is taking place somewhere else, but the price hike is happening at our local market today!

What’s actually possible?

It would be dishonest to wrap this up with a simple action plan that makes it feel manageable, because the scale of it genuinely isn’t simple. But thankfully, now air quality monitoring has become more accessible. Apps like IQAir pull from a global network of sensors and give you real-time data on what you’re breathing.

Knowing what the air is like gives you a chance to protect yourself. You can choose to stay in, keep your windows closed and wear a proper mask that filters out PM2.5 when you do go out. None of this solves the bigger problem, but it does mean you’re breathing in a lot less of the harmful stuff every day.

We keep on pushing everyone to plant trees. Why? Because they are a gift to us from Mother Earth, they hold the earth and living things together. Don’t take them for granted. Trees clean the air around them. Of course, a few plants can’t undo years of pollution rising from industries and factories or even the aftermath of explosions, but they still make a real difference for the neighbourhood. The air right around those trees becomes cleaner, and this is what we actually want.

Why does this matter?

The atmosphere is shared. The sky above Karachi, Multan, Peshawar, Gaza, Tehran and Kyiv is all the same sky. What burns there reaches everywhere. But what we choose to know, talk about and demand change — that matters!

We are a generation that has access to information like no generation before us. We can see the satellite images. We can check the air quality on our phones. We can read the research; therefore, we must pay attention and do our part.

Clean air isn’t a luxury. It’s something we’re all meant to have. But right now, war is taking it away, not just from those living through it, but from all of us in ways we don’t always see. Maybe it’s time we stop treating it like someone else’s problem.

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 11th, 2026