The Environmental Cost Of War

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0:20The rain that's coming down seems to be saturated or filled with oil. You can see it's completely black. Everything on the ground is black as well. And if you look over here at this wall, you can see that the rainwater coming down here is also black. That's reporting from CNN's Frederick Plankin earlier this month in Tehran. It occurred the morning after major airstrikes by Israel on Iran's oil facilities. The city of nearly 10 million people was engulfed in thick black smoke. The World Health Organization warned that, quote, the conflict in the Middle East poses serious threats to public health.

0:56A new report from the think tank Climate and Community Institute finds that the war unleashed over 5 million tons of carbon in just two weeks, which for context is more climate pollution than Iceland generates in a year. The environmental cost is growing as the death toll rises too. The U.S. and Israel's war on Iran has killed at least 1 ,500 people in the country. That's according to Iran's health ministry. and experts warn the environmental cost of the war can compound harm on human health for generations to come. Add to that the energy crisis the war is brewing, which could lead to even more long-term effects on the environment and public health.

1:34I'm Jen White. You're listening to the 1A Podcast. After a quick break, war, the environment, and our health. Stay with us.

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2:27BetterHelp makes it simple by matching you with a qualified therapist based on your needs and preferences. Visit betterhelp.com slash NPR for 10 % off. This message comes from Carvana, who makes car selling easy. Enter your license plate or VIN, get a real offer in minutes, and have your car picked up from your door. Sell your car the easy way with Carvana. Pickup fee may apply. Let's jump into the conversation with Doug Weir, the director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory. That's a UK-based nonprofit which works to raise awareness about the environmental and humanitarian consequences of war.

3:04Doug, welcome to the program. Hi, thanks for having me. And Professor John Levy, he's the chair of the Environmental Health Department at Boston University School of Public Health. John, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. So let's start with Israel's strikes on fuel depots in Iran. Residents in and around Tehran experience black rain after intense airstrikes on oil facilities. One resident told Time, quote, The skin on my face, especially my lips, is sore and raw. It burns and feels like diluted tear gas is in the air. It irritates my eyes and I keep needing to clear my throat. Doug, first just give us an overview of these attacks.

3:43Yeah, sure. So I think the first thing to understand is that oil facilities like these are very common targets in conflict areas. They have perceived military value to destroy them. I think in this case, these facilities were primarily civilian use. They are civilian objects and should be protected. Also critically, I think, is the setting of Tehran. So you have a city of nine million people, which is partially enclosed by mountains. It is well known that it has air quality problems because it traps pollutants in the city. And so attacking these four facilities overnight, as Israel did, led to huge fires and a lot of this pollution was pushed down into the city.

4:23And huge smoke plumes from these fires contained all sorts of nasties, from carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, volatile organic compounds and particles of soot and organic material and trace metals as well. So that's what people were exposed to directly through inhalation. And that's what we saw coming down in rain as a rain shower passed through the city. And when you talk about pollution being trapped in the city, is that a result of Iran's topography or something else? Yeah, it's due to Tehran's topography. So it's partially enclosed by mountains. And overnight, we typically see the atmosphere pushing pollutants down into the city.

5:00It's a very packed city as well, so it doesn't necessarily get the airflow that clear pollutants easily. All of this is well known. It's no great state secret or anything. So it was quite clear that if you attack these facilities overnight, you will end up with what is essentially an industrial disaster in the city. Now, Doug laid out some of the pollutants that are released as a result of these strikes, John. What are some of the short-term health risks this poses to Iranians on the ground? So in the short term, especially for pollutants like particulate matter, which Doug mentioned, or the smoke that you see in the air, that can cause a lot of respiratory problems, difficulty breathing.

5:43Certainly if you have asthma, it could lead to asthma attacks. A lot of people reported headaches, which is very common for those high levels of pollution. And there's also increases in cardiovascular risk when you're exposed to high levels of particulate air pollution. So you might see more heart attacks and other cardiovascular events. So there's a pretty wide array of short-term impact. And when you're seeing these visible complaints of symptoms, that's a pretty good sign that people are being quite highly exposed. And what about the longer-term health effects? the longer term is trickier but i think equally important we know that in pollutants like particulate matter can lead to long-term mortality risks you know respiratory and cardiovascular there is also risk of cancer and you know some of the pollutants that doug mentioned as well as others things like pahs as well as volatile organic compounds are known to cause cancer And so that, of course, wouldn't manifest in the short term, but very high exposures, especially sustained over a considerable period of time, could increase risks of things like cancer as well as cardiovascular or respiratory disease.

6:53Doug, when we talk about the black rain and the smoke in Tehran, we're describing primarily respiratory responses. But what are some of the knock-on effects when we think about perhaps water sources being affected or food? Yeah, I think from our monitoring, we saw that clearly oil products had entered the storm drain system. There was very shocking footage of an explosion in the underground storm system blowing up the street level. When we look at the digital elevation map for the sites, we can see that there would be a tendency for the pollutants to move downslope and potentially getting into soils and also into water aquifers.

7:36And one of the things with Iran at the moment is that it's had an incredibly intense drought for a long period of time, coupled with very poor water governance. And so water resources like aquifers are particularly sensitive in Iran and are already under pressure. So it's something which we need to be particularly careful about avoiding additional damage to, like pollution from these oil products. And are we talking about pollution that is then limited to Iran or Tehran, or is there the possibility of these pollutants reaching other areas as well? Yeah, I think our primary focus is around the local area where these pollutants fall out.

8:18I mean, with some of these large oil fires, we see pollutant fallout if the plume comes near to the ground. It's often it's lofted quite high up above. In some cases, historically, like in 1991 Gulf War oil fires, these were like 700 oil wells which burned for months on end, and it was shown that they had deposited soot in the Himalayas and increased the rate of glacial melting by turning the white snow darker. But in this case, we're looking at kind of isolated incidents from these oil facilities. John, who might be especially vulnerable to the type of pollution we're describing? So there's a bunch of groups that we would worry most about.

8:56Young children are at greater risk. They tend to breathe in a lot for the amount of size that they have. They can be at risk for developing asthma, other respiratory disease. We worry about older individuals who may have cardiovascular disease or respiratory disease and are at heightened risk for exposures to things like air pollution. We worry about pregnant women because there are risks of adverse birth outcomes with exposure to some of these toxicants. And so everyone has some potential risk from being exposed, but those are some of the groups that are at greatest concern, as well as anyone who has a preexisting health condition that could be exacerbated by air pollution, again, respiratory, cardiovascular, or even diabetes.

9:43What options do residents have to try to protect themselves? It's very challenging for sure. In typical situations, for example, when we have wildfires here in the United States, the guidance is often to stay indoors if you have an air filtration system to use that, to wear masks, certainly in outdoor settings as well as indoor settings, because this pollution can infiltrate into the indoor environment. That guidance is a lot more difficult, clearly, in the midst of wartime. I do think each of those steps can help, and so people can take at least measures to reduce their exposures. It's typically at least better to be indoors than outdoors if you don't have access to sort of a robust N95 mask.

10:33Even putting a bandana around your mouth may not protect from the smallest particles, but can help from some of the larger particles that are falling out. So it's sort of taking each possible step you can do to reduce your exposure, acknowledging that it's going to be pretty tough for most people to really bring down their exposures in the midst of wartime. So with that context, what concerns do you have about Iran's public health infrastructure and the way residents are able to access care if they are affected by this pollution? It's an important question because when we're talking about the short-term health effects, again, I mentioned things like asthma attacks, heart attacks, you need to be able to get to hospitals and emergency rooms and visit doctors.

11:19And if you're not able to access health care in a timely manner, the impact of that can be heightened. So an asthma attack that may have been able to be contained if you can get to the ER could lead to much greater problems if you can't access those resources. So, you know, if we're looking at the effects of the elevated air pollution in a vacuum, it's bad enough. But in the context of degraded public health infrastructure, health infrastructure and wartime, it's that much worse. That's Professor Jonathan Levy. He's the chair of the Environmental Health Department at Boston University School of Public Health.

11:56John, thank you for speaking with us. Sure. Thank you. Doug Weir, the director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, is staying with us. And we're hearing from you. One member of our tax club writes, My uncle served in Vietnam and received an orange heart for his exposure to Agent Orange. They told him for those exposed, it's not a question of if they would have health problems, but when. He passed last year, and I think about him with the current events of the world. Coming up, how the war in Iran could lead to a water and energy crisis. That's just ahead.

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13:10If you could go back and talk to your younger self, would you tell yourself that you have a job that truly makes you happy? Many people are stuck in jobs they've outgrown or never really wanted. A career coach from strawberry.me can help you move on to something you actually love. Benefit from having a dedicated coach in your corner and get 50 % off your first coaching session at strawberry.me. Back now to the environmental cost of war. And let's bring in two more voices. Nita Crawford is a professor of international relations at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She's also the co-founder and strategic advisor at the Costs of War Project at Brown University.

13:52Professor Crawford, thanks for joining us. Happy to be with you. And Patrick Bigger. He's a research director at the Climate and Community Institute. That's a progressive climate and economy think tank. Patrick, it's great to have you. Great to be here. We're also hearing from you. One of our tax club member writes, After Agent Orange exposure in Vietnam, my father died of an aggressive cancer. It was our own military, our own government that allowed this exposure to our men and women. Now hardly anyone thinks about Vietnam anymore and the peaceful men and women who were sent over there to die.

14:24But I do. I still miss my father. It never stops. Patrick, I want to jump in with a report from your organization, which you co-authored. It found over 5 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions were emitted from just two weeks of conflict in Iran. That's on par with the annual emissions of Iceland. Help us understand the impact of those emissions and what it actually means for the environment and human health. Well, I think it's important to flag that 5 million tons of emissions is not a huge volume in the grand scheme of things. But as we reflect on our dwindling carbon budget that we have left to stay under 1.5 or 2 degrees of warming, as we've been warned that we need to to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, Any additional and effectively voluntary addition to global emissions is really not helpful.

15:16And so thinking about the climate costs of war is a way of illustrating why we need different kinds of foreign policy, different kinds of international relations if we're really going to make a concerted global effort to avoid the worst impacts of the climate crisis. And Professor Crawford, the black rain scene in Tehran came from attacks on the oil facilities in Iran. What short and longer term environmental effects could we see from these attacks on that energy infrastructure? Well, in the short run, the most concerning element, and it wasn't actually mentioned in the report you just spoke about, is the methane released from both the oil infrastructure, the uncontrolled release of methane, and the methane released when cities are attacked.

16:07So methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. It's 25 times more potent in terms of warming capacity than carbon dioxide. And that release, as Doug Weir noted, may end at the end of the war or it may go on for months as facilities burn or you can't control the leaks from the pipes that are destroyed. So that's a major concern. And then in addition, some of that black smoke will be lofted very high into the atmosphere and will circulate around the world. That may cause a tiny, infinitesimal amount of cooling. But for the most part, the destruction of the oil fields and the natural gas facilities is a tremendous and, in fact, uncounted, because we can't count these leaks, part of the story.

17:09We've talked a lot about the black rain that came from the attacks on the oil facilities in Iran. But Doug, your organization has recorded over 400 incidents of environmental harm since the start of the U.S. and Israel's war on Iran. What other kinds of incidents are we seeing? Sure. So with our monitoring methodology, it's kind of facility-based. So we look at particular environmental infrastructures which have risks to the environment when they're damaged. So that might be power plants. It might be industrial zones. It might be military bases or airfields, for example. And in the first few weeks of the war, we saw a fairly familiar pattern of lots of military sites being targeted.

17:52So some of the ones of concern are large ammunition storage areas. So when these are struck, you tend to have a lot of kick out of pollution from military materials. So this might be explosives or propellants. And many of these are toxic and some are environmentally persistent. We've also seen lots of attacks on missile facilities. and many of the fuels used in these ballistic missiles are very unpleasant and hazardous for the environment. In addition, obviously, we've seen more attacks on oil-related facilities and indeed on shipping and ports as well, so also risks to the marine environment.

18:26So one of the things we've kind of been watching is as the war has gone on, you see this kind of list of targets gone through and the environmental harms associated with those. I think increasingly we're seeing quite a lot of bombing within urban areas as well, so that then brings in the spectrum of this health risk from the use of explosive weapons in populated areas, which can expose people to very poor air quality and exposures to things like asbestos when buildings are damaged. What are the challenges around monitoring the environmental harms that come from conflict, Doug? Yeah, I mean, it can be hugely challenging.

19:03We do what we do because the traditional model has been that you go in after a conflict when people have stopped shooting and when it's safe for the UN and other stakeholders to do environmental assessments. That obviously means that you miss a lot of the environmental story during the conflict. Over the last 15 years, we've had much better access to satellite imagery. We also use social media extensively to try and identify what's going on. And we have a methodology which we developed for the war in Ukraine, which takes you through various steps to determine the environmental risks from particular types of damage to facilities.

19:37So, So, for example, we have about 130 different facility types in the database with potential environmental risks from them. We can look at what they're in proximity to. So is it agricultural land? Is it water body? Is it an ecologically important area? And this helps us develop a kind of risk storm prioritisation around these sites. Obviously, this is still a very limited picture. And really, for all of these environmental problems, you've got to get on the ground, take soil samples, take water samples. But that may be way down the line before that happens. Patrick, I'm curious about the challenges you face in really understanding and explaining to the public how much pollution is being emitted, the potential longer term effects of that pollution on the environment and human health.

20:30Yeah, so like Doug, we have to rely on more or less open source reporting. We try to tally the number of bombs that are being dropped, the volume of oil that's burned, and then apply our own methodology, which we also developed trying to track the emissions from the Israeli assault on Gaza starting after the attacks of October 7th. And so it's always a challenge to know if you are counting everything that could be counted. And so we think that our estimates are always very conservative. As Professor Crawford said, we're not even covering the potential methane emissions from these attacks on Iran so far.

21:09But this is part of a broader challenge that we have in understanding the full scope of the climate harms done by militaries across the world. Because from the very outset of designing sort of global climate governance at the Kyoto Protocols in the 1990s, militaries, and especially the U.S. military, sought an explicit carve out from reporting their emissions. And so for a long, long time, it was up to researchers like us, like Professor Crawford, others, to even understand what the climate impacts of militaries were in general, much less their conflict emissions, which we now have okay methodologies for each of these things, I think.

21:52but it still falls on independent researchers to try to understand them and then communicate our findings to the public about, you know, the fact that militaries represent five and a half percent of global emissions, which is more than global commercial aviation, right? These are really substantial emissions that are fundamentally not being counted and are, you know, not really subject to the kinds of emissions reduction policies that virtually every other sector in the world is. Well, Professor Crawford, you've calculated that the Pentagon is the world's largest single greenhouse gas emitter.

22:25How does one country's military become so environmentally detrimental? Well, the United States military is unlike any other military in the world. The U.S. has 700 right now overseas bases. It's got thousands of bases and installations in the continental United States and Hawaii. So it's just standing infrastructure, pre-war, during war, after war, is enormously emitting. And for instance, last year, rather 2024, the United States military in its installations and operations emitted 47 million metric tons. And that's larger than the emissions of Norway or Sweden in any one year. So it's so large because the United States footprint, global footprint is large.

23:22And then when it makes war, it has a preference to making war with aircraft. It doesn't like to put a lot of boots on the ground. And aircraft in particular account for most of the operational emissions. So a plane which burns four gallons per mile is not efficient. That's the kind of air force that we have. And each branch of the military has its own planes. We're hearing from many of you. One of you emails, my husband was a C-141 pilot and flew in the first Gulf War. He developed and died of ALS, and the VA now considers ALS a 100 % service connection. Environmental factors such as toxins and heavy metals have been linked to ALS.

24:10We also heard from Robert, who says, I served in the Persian Gulf War with the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. I was exposed to a large number of toxins, everything from tanks shut up with depleted uranium shells to burn pits. I'm now in the Veterans Administration Health Registry, which, quote, will monitor my health, and as a consequence, any health issues are presumed to be service-related. We also got this text from one listener who says, Let's pray that this war causes the markets to trend towards sustainable energy so our children will be able to breathe. Now, this war is creating an energy crisis in the U.S.

24:44and globally. Professor Crawford, what could that mean for us and the types of energy we rely on in the longer term? Well, in the short run, it means that when people can't heat their homes in a war zone, they turn to coal and coffee cans and other highly emitting forms of energy production. And if countries across the globe, mostly in Asia, which is where most of us oil from the Persian Gulf is going, cannot use petroleum or natural gas, they will burn more coal in the short run. And that reliance in the maintenance of coal infrastructure delays the transition to alternative fuels. And so you add the delay that is a feature of this and the increased short-term use of fossil fuels to the actual use of fuel in the war zones and the destruction there.

25:51That's quite a bump. And then in addition, what happens is during wartime and afterwards, for instance, we saw this with the war in Ukraine, countries that are near the fighting will often increase their military spending. And that itself causes a bump in buying more aircraft, tanks, missiles, increasing military industrial production, which is itself highly greenhouse gas emitting. And then the operations and training of those militaries go up. And this has been documented many times in scientific journals that increases in military spending are correlated with national increases in emissions.

26:37And this is a very long-term consequence. So any sort of good luck we have with, in the short run, people transitioning to alternative energy is great, but wars itself far outweigh, in some respects, those gains. Patrick, I see you nodding as Professor Crawford is speaking. Is there anything you'd add? Absolutely. I think that's a really good summary of some of the military dimensions. And I think thinking maybe even one step further removed, understanding the sort of global political economy of energy, what we've seen over and over again during energy shocks are windfall profits to fossil fuel firms, especially those whose production is unaffected directly by the conflict.

27:25So thinking of U.S. fossil fuel producers here primarily right now who are going to experience this huge windfall profit and then will almost invariably, as they have for the last 50 years, plow some of those back into expanded exploration and production of new fossil fuels, which creates these lock-in effects. It's virtually unprecedented for us to not use up an energy source that we have found. And so therefore, as we see the price of oil skyrocketing and the cost of energy really becoming very volatile, which traders can profit off of, we'll see that plod back into new fossil fuel infrastructure, particularly in countries that do not seem to be particularly concerned with the impacts of the climate crisis, like the United States right now.