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The Iran War Is Also a Climate War

Climate change is not a peripheral part of what we’re seeing in Iran—it’s structurally embedded in modern warfare.

Men watch from a hillside as a plume of smoke rises after an explosion on March 2, 2026, in Tehran, Iran.

War makes climate change worse in many ways, and vice versa. The human costs of the US-Israel attack on Iran—the hundreds of people who have died, including a reported 175 young girls and teachers killed at the Shajareh Tayyibeh primary school—are a tragedy. The mounting economic risks—disrupted supply chains, rising energy prices, shaken stock markets—are ominous. The danger that this war of choice launched by two nuclear-armed states will escalate further, drawing in powers across the region and beyond, is alarming. And threaded through each of these concerns is the fact that modern warfare is inextricably linked with climate change.

The linkages flow in both directions. Wars unleash gargantuan amounts of planet-warming emissions: Russia’s war in Ukraine, for example, has generated emissions equal to the annual emissions of France. Those extra emissions drive deadlier heat, drought, storms, and other impacts that wreck livelihoods, destabilize economies, and spur migration, making armed conflict more likely. The British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 warned in January that climate disruption and biodiversity loss, if left unchecked, will cause “crop failures, intensified natural disasters, and infectious disease outbreaks…exacerbating existing conflicts, starting new ones, and threatening global security and........

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