When we talk about the costs of war, we count casualties, displaced populations, and destroyed infrastructure. We rarely count wetlands. We rarely count seabirds. We rarely count the slow poisoning of a coastline that will outlast any ceasefire by decades.

The ongoing conflict centred on Iran has the potential to change that conversation, and the science is hard to ignore.

The Gulf Was Already Running Out of Margin

The Persian Gulf is one of the most physically constrained marine bodies on earth. It is shallow, enclosed, and warm, sitting at the intersection of some of the highest concentrations of oil infrastructure, desalination plants, and coastal development anywhere in the world. Long before the current conflict, it was already under severe ecological pressure: coral bleaching, dredging, chronic pollution from shipping, and growing thermal stress from a warming climate (Reference 1).

Ecologists understand this concept well. When a system has already absorbed years of chronic disturbance, its capacity to absorb an acute shock is drastically reduced. The Gulf, in ecological terms, is a system with very little buffer left.

The Numbers We Should Be Talking About

In the first two weeks of the current conflict, an estimated 5 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent were released, more than the entire annual emissions of 84 of the world’s lowest-emitting countries combined. The destruction of buildings alone contributed around 2.4 million tons of CO2. Fires at fuel storage facilities burned the equivalent of 2.5 to nearly 6 million barrels of oil, sending black plumes of sulphur dioxide, volatile organic compounds, and particulate matter across the region.

The Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), which monitors environmental harm in conflict zones in near real-time, has recorded over 300 environmental risk incidents since hostilities began. These incidents are releasing a toxic inventory that includes heavy metals, energetic compounds, dioxins, furans, and PFAS compounds, the so-called “forever chemicals”, into soils, waterways, and the air breathed by millions of people.

The Marine Dimension: A Risk the Whole Region Shares

Perhaps the most acute environmental risk right now is the Persian Gulf’s marine ecosystem. A major oil spill, the kind that becomes possible when tankers are struck or pipeline infrastructure is damaged near the Strait of Hormuz, would be catastrophic in a way that transcends borders.

We have a historical benchmark for this. The 1991 Gulf War produced one of the largest deliberate oil spills in history, estimated at 800,000 tonnes (Reference 2). Scientific assessments conducted years afterwards found that weathered oil persisted on Saudi beaches more than a decade later, that 50 to 90% of intertidal fauna in affected zones had been wiped out, and that an estimated 100,000 wading birds perished. Marine ecosystems that had taken centuries to establish were functionally destroyed in months (Reference 3).

The current conflict has not yet produced a spill of that scale. But dozens of tankers were trapped in the Strait of Hormuz in the early weeks of fighting, and strikes on energy infrastructure in Iran and the wider Gulf region remain an ongoing risk. In a body of water this enclosed, with this little capacity to flush and recover, the margin between a near-miss and a catastrophe is uncomfortably thin.

This Is Not Just Iran’s Problem

One of the most important things to understand about marine ecology is that it does not respect national boundaries, and neither does environmental contamination (Reference 4).

Sulphur dioxide plumes from gas field incidents in the southern Gulf have already crossed state lines. Migratory bird flyways connecting Central Asia, East Africa, and Europe pass directly over this region (Reference 5, 6). Fish stocks, turtles, and dugongs that communities across the Gulf depend on for food and livelihoods move freely across the waters that separate these states. The desalination plants that provide drinking water to millions of people in the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia draw from the same body of water that now faces elevated contamination risk.

Environmental damage in a conflict zone is not contained to the conflict zone. That lesson has been learned repeatedly, from the Kuwait oil fires of 1991, to the burning of Iraqi oil infrastructure in the 2000s, to the industrial contamination that still affects Iraq’s southern marshes today.

What Science and Policy Can Do

The good news, if there is any, is that the tools for responding to this situation exist. CEOBS and partner organisations are already doing real-time environmental damage mapping (Reference 1). Carbon accounting frameworks developed in the context of the Ukraine and Gaza conflicts are being applied here. The principles of conflict-sensitive environmental management, recognising that post-conflict recovery must include ecological recovery, are increasingly embedded in international humanitarian frameworks.

What is needed now is for the environmental dimensions of this conflict to be treated with the same seriousness as the humanitarian ones. That means funding for independent environmental monitoring. It means ensuring that any ceasefire and reconstruction process includes binding commitments to environmental assessment and remediation. And it means treating the Persian Gulf’s ecosystems, the mangroves, coral communities, seagrass beds, and intertidal mudflats that support the region’s food and water security, as part of the critical infrastructure that needs protecting.

The Gulf region has spent decades building some of the world’s most ambitious environmental programmes, from coral reef restoration in Bahrain (Reference 8) to the Hatta mountain ecosystem conservation projects in the UAE (Reference 9) to large-scale afforestation initiatives across the Arabian Peninsula (Reference 10). That investment, that vision of a region that can reconcile development with ecological health, is part of what is at stake when environmental monitoring goes dark, when contamination is left unassessed, and when the long-term costs are deferred until they become someone else’s emergency.

The environment does not wait for peace to start suffering the consequences of war. And it will not wait for peace to start recovering either, but only if we choose to help it do so.

If you work in environmental policy, ecology, or regional development in the Gulf, I would welcome your perspective in the comments. What mechanisms do you think are most critical for protecting the region’s ecosystems in the current context?

Photo by Fer Troulik on Unsplash