When tensions in the Middle East reached a breaking point in early 2026, the world began counting casualties, barrel prices, and displaced shipping routes.
Almost nobody began counting the carbon. But every missile strike, every oil facility threatened, and every military jet scrambling across the Persian Gulf is burning fuel, releasing toxins, and pushing planet-warming gases into an atmosphere already at a breaking point.
“These shocks divert resources from decarbonisation, lock in fossil fuel reliance amid price surges, and undermine Paris Agreement goals, with reconstruction emissions poised to compound long-term atmospheric burdens,” said Professor Anjal Prakash of the Indian School of Business and a contributor to the 7th IPCC climate assessment.
War, it turns out, is one of the most efficient and the least-accounted-for underminers of the world’s efforts to combat climate change.
HOW MUCH POLLUTION IS CAUSED BY WARS?
Conflicts around the globe bring about not just a human toll but also factors that undermine the very future of humanity as the world prepares for a rapidly warming planet.
Numbers can help paint a more staggering picture of the impacts of war and conflict.
The first 120 days of the Israel-Gaza conflict alone generated emissions greater than the annual output of 26 countries, according to a 2024 study.
If you include the carbon cost of rebuilding destroyed infrastructure, the number shoots past the annual emissions of over 135 nations, including the combined output of Sweden and Portugal.
The Russia-Ukraine war has been no different.
A report by the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War found that nearly three years of fighting generated the equivalent of 230 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is equivalent to the annual emissions generated by Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia put together.
Warfare activities alone, like tanks, fighter jets, and artillery, contributed 36 per cent of those emissions. War-triggered wildfires contributed another massive chunk.
In 2024, Ukraine saw 9,65,000 hectares burn, more than twice the area that burned across the entire European Union (EU) in the same period.
What’s more worrying is that none of this is captured in any official climate report.
Under the Paris Agreement, reporting military emissions is entirely voluntary, meaning emissions continue unabated as wars rage on across regions.
HOW MUCH EMISSION IS THE IRAN WAR RELEASING?
As of March 2026, the potential for a full-scale kinetic war in the region remains the greatest single threat to global climate stability.
The Gulf is particularly alarming because of what is potentially on fire.
Oil refineries, gas processing plants, and fuel terminals, when struck, release not just CO2 but sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, carcinogenic particulates, and toxic organic compounds.
While Iran’s South Pars gas field, the world’s largest, remains a focal point of regional tension, the environmental fallout of a full-scale strike would be catastrophic.
The Persian Gulf is a semi-enclosed sea. It cannot flush these pollutants out quickly.
Shipping detours caused by the conflict are also piling on. Vessels taking longer routes around the Strait of Hormuz burn significantly more fuel during every journey they undertake, an invisible emissions surcharge on every cargo ship re-routing through the Indian Ocean.
WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR INDIA?
India is caught in a double bind.
As the world’s most populous country and a country importing nearly 85 per cent of its crude oil, with much of it through the now-disrupted Gulf route, supply shocks are forcing a relapse to coal, the fuel India has in the greatest domestic abundance and the one most damaging to its climate commitments.
India has pledged to cut emissions by 45 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030 and reach net-zero by 2070.
Every time a conflict-driven oil shock pushes the grid toward coal, that timeline stretches.
India’s western coast also lies directly downwind of Gulf pollution corridors, and in a country already home to 13 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities, any additional particulate burden is not a marginal risk, and that is a compounding public health emergency.
WHAT NEEDS TO CHANGE?
Wars will continue to happen.
But the world’s refusal to account for their climate costs is a choice, and an increasingly costly one.
With COP31 in Australia and the Pacific later this year, the case for mandatory military emissions reporting has never been more urgent.
India, as a major non-combatant economy bearing disproportionate consequences, has both the standing and the incentive to push for exactly that.
