In 1991, as Iraqi forces withdrew from Kuwait, they ignited more than 700 oil wells and turned the landscape into an inferno. For approximately 10 months, flames raged without pause, sending smoke plumes as far as 800 miles and spilling around 11 million barrels of crude oil into the Persian Gulf. At the time, the world largely saw it as a military event.

But it was not only a military episode. It was also one of the starkest warnings that war does not merely destroy armies and cities; it can devastate entire ecosystems. The lesson was brutal and unforgettable: war does not end with shattered buildings and body counts. It blackens the sky, poisons the sea, contaminates the land and leaves behind a carbon burden that can outlive the gunfire by decades.

Today, that same dynamic — war as environmental weapon — is playing out on a far larger, faster and more measurable scale.

WHAT BURNS IN TEHRAN

Since early March, the US and Israel have rained tens of thousands of bombs and missiles on Iranian targets, striking oil refineries, military installations, industrial zones, schools, hospitals, civilian infrastructure and nuclear sites. Iran has responded in kind, firing suicide drones and ballistic missiles at Israeli territory and neighbouring Gulf nations, including the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

From Kuwait’s burning oil fields in 1991 to Tehran’s blackened skies in 2026, war has always poisoned the planet. But as global military spending hits record highs and conflicts multiply, the climate toll of warfare has become impossible to ignore

Among the most apocalyptic visuals to emerge from the conflict are the thick, dark clouds and black rainfall that descended on Tehran after Israeli strikes ignited major fuel storage facilities on the city’s outskirts on March 7, 2026, making millions of litres of fuel go up in flames. Analysts estimate that these attacks — along with Iranian retaliatory strikes on Gulf neighbours — have collectively burned somewhere between 2.5 and 5.9 million barrels of oil, releasing roughly 1.8-2m tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Before that, on March 6, the US struck an Iranian drone-launching ship, the Shahid Bagheri, off the coast of the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas. The attack caused an oil slick more than 20km long, threatening mangroves and other protected nature sites on Iran’s coastline. By early April, the Shahid Bagheri had still not entirely sunk, and traces of oil were visible near the wreck.

The scale of this burden becomes even more alarming when broken down. A single F-35 fighter jet sortie is reported to emit between 14 and 17 tonnes of CO2. A B-2 bomber mission emits roughly 251 tonnes. For every US$100 billion the world spends on weapons and armies, an estimated 32m additional tonnes of CO2 are pumped into the atmosphere. These are not marginal costs. They are climate consequences on a massive scale.

According to the US-based Climate and Community Institute, the total greenhouse gas emissions from the first 14 days of the US-Israel war against Iran were more than 5m tonnes of carbon dioxide, which is higher than the total climate pollution of Iceland in 2024. “This figure is also equivalent to the emissions from 1.1m [petrol]-powered cars over a year and represents over $1.3 billion in climate damage,” the think tank notes.

BREATHING THE WAR

The strikes released a toxic mix of fine particulate matter and hazardous gases, exposing millions to polluted air, exposing around nine million residents in Tehran and another five million people nearby to toxic smoke. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has warned that this kind of smoke does not remain suspended harmlessly in the atmosphere; it enters lungs, settles into soil, seeps into water and contaminates crops.

The fallout does not respect borders. Pakistan, lying downwind and already among the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, faces particular exposure.

Pakistan already ranks 151 out of 192 countries on the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Index (ND-GAIN), suffers average PM2.5 concentrations of 67.3 µg/m3 — roughly 13 times above the World Health Organisation guideline — and endures approximately 128,000 premature deaths every year from air pollution. On top of this, the country has already sustained more than US$30 billion in climate-related economic losses.

THE PERMANENT MACHINE

The environmental toll of active warfare is staggering enough. But the climate cost of simply maintaining the world’s militaries — even in peacetime — may be even more alarming.

Global military expenditure increased to $2.887 trillion in 2025, the 11th year of consecutive rises, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. This brings the global military burden—military expenditure as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) — to 2.5 per cent, its highest level since 2009.

Every year, the world’s militaries collectively generate an estimated 2,750m tonnes of CO2 equivalent, or 5.5 percent of total global greenhouse gas emissions, according to UK-based collective Scientists for Global Responsibility. If the world’s militaries were treated as a country, they would rank as the fourth-largest emitter on Earth.

Yet much of this burden remains deliberately obscured. The UN has reported that a typical government’s disclosed military emissions data is around 95 percent lower than what is indicated from its own documents, and represents less than 10 percent of the total military emissions associated with that country or area. Even more disturbingly, no country, including the United States, has reported emissions data linked to actual military operations.

This is not an oversight. It is a structural exemption — one that was written into the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 and which has largely survived every climate framework since.

THE SECOND DESTRUCTION

Then comes reconstruction, the phase often framed as recovery but which carries its own enormous climate price. In Ukraine, the war has already generated an estimated 237m tonnes of CO2 equivalent emissions connected to war efforts, while Kyiv has lodged a US$44 billion claim against the Russian Federation.

Across conflicts, a similar pattern appears. According to a UN assessment from September 2025, an estimated 250,000 buildings had been damaged or destroyed in Gaza, producing around 61m tonnes of debris. A 2026 open-access publication in One Earth estimated that total conflict-related CO2 emissions in Gaza exceeded 33.2m tonnes, including more than 1.3m tonnes emitted directly from the conduct of war itself.

In Lebanon, more than 50,000 housing units were destroyed or damaged by Israel within about 45 days of war. In Iran, 7,645 buildings have been destroyed in the war, according to satellite damage assessments by Conflict Ecology, a geospatial research lab at the University of Oregon.

THE HUMAN REMAINDER

Beneath all of this lies a widening social collapse. By late 2024, an unprecedented 83.4m people were internally displaced worldwide, including 73.5m uprooted by conflict or violence and another 9.8m displaced by disasters.

By mid-2025, the number of people displaced by war, armed conflict and political persecution had reached 117m, with three-quarters of them living in countries facing high to extreme climate hazards.

The pressures do not end there. More than 295m people across 53 countries and territories experienced acute hunger in 2024. Yet only about 10 percent of global climate finance reached fragile states, amounting to an average of roughly US$5 per person for adaptation, and just US$2 per person in high-intensity conflict zones. Most shockingly of all, fragile states received less than one percent of total adaptation finance reaching the 10 most fragile countries.

Behind each of these numbers is a family that no longer has a home to return to, in a country that is often simultaneously at war and under water or burning.

The conclusion is increasingly difficult to ignore. What began as a warning in the Kuwaiti desert in 1991 has since become doctrine, repeated in Gaza, Ukraine, Lebanon and now Iran. War has become a full-scale climate multiplier. It drives emissions upward, poisons ecosystems, destabilises energy markets, deepens displacement and pushes mitigation further out of reach.

Military emissions must be counted. Reconstruction must be low-carbon. Climate finance must move decisively toward fragile frontline states instead of retreating from them. Every bomb dropped adds to the climate crisis. The accounting must begin now.

The writer is an MBE known for his work in sustainable finance and impact investment. He is also a visiting professor at the University of St Mary’s in the UK. He can be contacted at faraz@sustainadility.com

Published in Dawn, EOS, May 3rd, 2026