The environmental cost of the Iran war in the Gulf

A memory has been returning to me with unusual force these past days. Inside the Ukraine pavilion at COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, war and climate were being held in the same frame. Delegates were being asked to face a reality that public discourse still struggles to hold steadily in view: conflict does not end at the front line. Its consequences travel outward through energy systems, across land and water, into food, air and the environmental conditions that make life possible. I remember standing there with a sense of recognition that felt larger than the exhibit itself, the kind that does not leave when you walk away, the kind that only deepens with time.
Its meaning feels heavier now because our region is living through a moment that reminds us how fragile the illusion of separation has always been. On March 7 and 8, strikes on oil depots and refineries around Tehran sent dense, chemically laden smoke across a city of more than 9 million people. Within days, the World Health Organization was warning of toxic hydrocarbons, sulfur oxides and nitrogen compounds in the air, while rain fell black over parts of the capital. Air is the first witness in wars like these. It carries combustion, metal, residue and fear far beyond the site of impact, then settles into lungs, buildings and memory. Ecological consequences rarely stay contained within the limits imagined by human conflict, and they linger long after the language of the moment has moved on.
The sea tells the same story, though it registers damage less visibly. Multiple commercial vessels have been struck in and around the Strait of Hormuz in recent days. Maritime traffic through the corridor has fallen by roughly 97 per cent from its February average, leaving ships anchored, rerouted or waiting under threat conditions in one of the most environmentally exposed waterways on earth. Every disruption in such a corridor raises the likelihood of collision, spill, fire and delayed response. When fuel enters the water column, contamination moves through the systems that sustain life, coating gills, settling into sediment and weakening the smaller organisms on which entire marine food webs depend.
Vulnerability in the Gulf begins long before a headline appears. The Regional Organization for the Protection of the Marine Environment describes a marine system that supports more than 500 fish species in the inner Gulf and more than 1,100 off Oman, while the region also holds the second most important dugong population in the world after Australia. These ecosystems are already operating under extreme pressure from warming seas, salinity stress and chronic pollution. War does not arrive in an empty landscape but in a living system already close to its limit.
Memory matters here because the Gulf has lived through this before. During the 1991 Gulf War, Iraqi forces released an estimated 6 to 8 million barrels of oil into Gulf waters and set more than 700 Kuwaiti oil wells on fire. The result was one of the largest environmental disasters linked to warfare in modern history. Shorelines were contaminated, groundwater was affected, desert soils were transformed by oil lakes and tarcrete, and the damage was so extensive that it gave rise to one of the largest UN environmental compensation and restoration efforts on record. History in this region offers no room for the fantasy that nature simply absorbs war and returns unchanged.
Bushehr brings that truth into even sharper focus. The International Atomic Energy Agency has warned that a direct hit on the plant could cause a very high release of radioactivity into the environment. It has also warned that disabling the two external power lines serving the plant could lead to a reactor core melt, with consequences extending across hundreds of kilometres. This matters profoundly in a region that holds roughly 60% of global desalination capacity. While groundwater exists in parts of the GCC, desalination remains the primary source of freshwater for most of the population, and nearly all of it is produced at the coast. Once seawater intakes are compromised, the crisis does not remain a nuclear story or an energy story. It becomes a water story, a food story and a survival story all at once. Qatar's Prime Minister has said publicly that his government ran simulations of a strike on Bushehr. The Gulf's water, he said, would be entirely contaminated, and Qatar would run out of freshwater in three days. Contamination in a largely enclosed body of water with limited exchange with the open ocean would not flush but persist.
Peace lives in these systems whether we acknowledge it or not. It lives in clean water, living seas, breathable air and ecosystems still capable of carrying future generations with dignity. Oman has long understood this. A tradition of dialogue and restraint carries particular weight in moments like these because it reflects a recognition that what is shared between nations outlasts what divides them. Beneath the political language, something else is moving through the region, a recognition, felt more than spoken, that the natural world is never outside the story of conflict. It is where the longest consequences settle. The sea absorbs what humanity refuses to resolve, and it remembers longer than we do.