Episode 359: Conflict Pollution: How Modern War Damages Climate, Water, and Land for Generations with Doug Weir
This episode hosts Doug Weir from the Conflict and Environment Observatory to examine the environmental consequences of modern warfare and the wider ecological risks created by armed conflict. The conversation explores how conflict generates complex forms of pollution, from toxic air emissions and oil fires to groundwater contamination and long-term ecological damage, often with impacts that persist decades after the fighting ends. Drawing on recent conflicts including Ukraine and developments across the Middle East, we discuss how environmental harm in conflict is assessed in practice, including the different pollution risks associated with military sites, energy facilities, industrial infrastructure, and damaged landscapes, and why these impacts remain underreported in both policy and media narratives.
The episode also examines the broader environmental dimensions of warfare, distinguishing between direct damage, such as bombed landscapes, spills, fires, and soil contamination, and indirect impacts, including weakened environmental governance, deforestation, disrupted resource systems, and growing pressures on water and energy infrastructure. Drawing on lessons from Ukraine, where researchers have begun mapping the emissions footprint of conflict, the discussion highlights how the carbon cost of war is only one part of a much wider environmental picture. A central theme throughout the episode is the gap between the immediate visibility of conflict, through destruction and casualties, and the slower, less visible environmental consequences that unfold over years or decades. We also explore the challenges of accountability, the lack of transparency around military emissions, and how geopolitical instability can undermine global environmental cooperation and climate governance.
Doug Weir is a leading expert on the environmental dimensions of armed conflict and is Director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, where he focuses on monitoring and addressing conflict-related environmental harm. His work examines issues including conflict pollution, military emissions, and the long-term environmental impacts of warfare, contributing to international efforts to improve data, accountability, and policy responses in this area.
The International Risk Podcast brings you conversations with global experts, frontline practitioners, and senior decision-makers who are shaping how we understand and respond to international risk. From geopolitical instability and organised crime to cybersecurity threats and hybrid warfare, each episode explores the forces transforming our world and what smart leaders must do to navigate them. Whether you’re a board member, policymaker, or risk professional, The International Risk Podcast delivers actionable insights, sharp analysis, and real-world stories that matter.
Dominic Bowen is the host of The International Risk Podcast and Europe’s leading expert on international risk and crisis management. As Head of Strategic Advisory and Partner at one of Europe’s leading risk management consulting firms, Dominic advises CEOs, boards, and senior executives across the continent on how to prepare for uncertainty and act with intent. He has spent decades working in war zones, advising multinational companies, and supporting Europe’s business leaders. Dominic is the go-to business advisor for leaders navigating risk, crisis,
Transcript
00:00
Doug Weir
When we look at somewhere, like Ukraine, we have had this long, slow-moving front line which is basically grinding through Ukrainian countryside and landscape. Novel forms of pollution, like millions of kilometres of fibreoptic cable which are now draping the countryside and which will be around in the environment for at least 700-800 years, it’s bogging the mind almost to think about what this is going to look like.
00:21
Elisa Garbil
Welcome back to the International Risk Podcast, where we discuss the latest world news and significant events that impact businesses and organisations worldwide.
00:29
Dominic Bowen
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01:01
Dominic Bowen
In modern conflict, the environmental costs of war are often overlooked, yet they’re profound, they’re long-lasting, and they have a global impact. From the targeting of oil facilities and industrial infrastructure to the contamination of water systems and agricultural land, war leaves behind environmental damage that can persist for decades.
I’m Dominic Bowen, and I’m the host of The International Risk Podcast. Today we’re joined by Doug Weir from The Conflict and Environment Observatory. Doug’s a leading expert on the environmental dimensions of armed conflict and we’re really lucky to have him on the podcast today.
Doug, welcome to The International Risk Podcast.
01:35
Doug Weir
Thanks, Dominic, great to be here.
01:37
Dominic Bowen
And whereabouts in the world are you today?
01:39
Doug Weir
So we’re based in West Yorkshire, halfway up the UK.
01:42
Dominic Bowen
Fantastic. Well, look, thanks very much for coming on the podcast today. I’d love to speak with you starting with some news headlines that really are at the top of everyone’s feed. I think that people are starting to be a little bit more concerned about environmental impacts. Now, given Iran’s oil and petrochemical industries, and the really relentless attacks by the US and Israel over the last five or six weeks, what are the kinds of environmental consequences that we might see? I mean, since February, US and Israeli strikes have hit energy infrastructure, military infrastructure, refineries, missile production sites. So from your experience documenting wartime pollution, what are the immediate toxic and ecological effects? What are we likely to see over the medium and longer term?
02:25
Doug Weir
Good question. At this stage of the conflict, a lot of our focus is on conflict pollution, as you said. To try and figure that out, we need to look at what kind of sites are being targeted. A bunch of those have been military sites.
All these sites containing missiles, for example, the fuels that go into these missiles are pretty unpleasant. When those are damaged, if these sites are underground, that’s potentially exposing groundwater to pollution, for example. We’ve seen attacks on naval facilities, a lot of sinkings of naval vessels.
We’ve been tracking one quite significant oil spill from Iran’s drone aircraft carrier, which is currently grounded near Qeshm Island. We’ve also seen increasing attacks on energy facilities across the region, including very significant oil fires at sites like Fujairah in the UAE, in the last few days before the ceasefire was announced. We saw this shift towards attacking industrial infrastructure. Some of those are petrochemical sites, but also metallurgical sites and things like that. All of these different sites have different potential pollution footprints, and some of those will be acute risks from exposure to air pollution, from things that are burning. But over the longer term, we may well see soil contamination and water contamination, and Iran has been one where we’ve been really concerned about water pollution in particular. They’ve had extremely long drought and this track record of very poor water governance. So there’s real concerns over the exposure of aquifers to contamination from the conflict.
03:41
Dominic Bowen
We have actually had a couple of really good interviews on The International Risk Podcast with some experts from Iran about the water crisis. For anyone that wants to learn more about that, please do go back and have a look at some of our earlier episodes.
Now, we’ve seen in the last couple of weeks that Iran has requested reparations from the US for its attacks. Now, given that neither the US nor Israel are particularly transparent about their military emissions or battlefield contaminations, what mechanisms actually exist, if any, to hold the countries accountable for the environmental damage in Iran? Are we witnessing yet another war where ecological harm is completely unreported and maybe even unpunished?
04:17
Doug Weir
Yeah, this is a tough area. When we look back in history, there are occasions where states have been held accountable for environmental damage. So my main example is the 1991 Gulf War where you had a UN Security Council resolution which ended up with revenue from Iraq’s oil sales going to its neighbors to help compensate them for damage. There were a whole bunch of claims in there from private individuals, from businesses, from neighboring states, then right down at the end, there were claims for damage to the environment. That might’ve been through marine oil spills or through for other sources.
So the model there, we know how to do this. It’s increasingly been in focus in Ukraine as well, where there were very high expectations that Russia’s assets may have been seized and used for compensation. Typically when we see this, the environment is last in the list of things to be compensated. You’re not going to get a UN Security Council resolution through because Russia has a veto in the Security Council. It’s not a model which we can directly transpose.
There is a register of damage that’s been set up for Ukraine, which is based in The Hague, which is gathering evidence of harm, and they’re about to start collecting information and evidence of environmental damage. But when we look to Iran and the US and Israel, it’s not necessarily a legal question. We have plenty of precedent around what state accountability is and responsibility for internationally wrongful acts. The attack on Iran was an internationally wrongful act, there was no Security Council resolution, for example.
But it’s ultimately a question of political will. If the political will is not there at the moment, then you’re not really going to get anywhere in terms of accountability.
05:45
Dominic Bowen
And you started to talk about Ukraine now. The first few years of Russia’s war in Ukraine generated emissions comparable to several European Union countries combined. How does the scale of the environmental impact reshape how we should be thinking about the carbon cost of war? The traumatic injuries and the death, destruction and displacement of people is something that we all see from many conflicts, but the carbon cost of the war is something that we don’t often think about. Can you help us understand, maybe using Ukraine as a case study, how should we think about this?
06:15
Doug Weir
Ukraine is the first time anybody has ever tried to comprehensively map the emissions footprint from a conflict. Prior to that, there’s been a general understanding or sense that emissions go down because economic activity goes down. While that’s certainly true in some sectors, we also know that emissions go differently, they might pop up elsewhere. They might shift to different industries, there might be emissions which are directly linked to the conflict itself, such as emissions from landscape fires.
What is interesting, when you step back, has been the degree of attention this question of greenhouse gas emissions from conflict has attracted from the media. This is just one component of environmental harm that we see from conflicts, but almost because it’s a new thing and because we have these existing meta narratives, you could say around the climate crisis and journalists whose beat is to cover climate issues.
It’s perhaps got more precedence than maybe it should, at least greater focus on some of the other environmental harms, which is super complex. When we think about the emissions footprint of conflicts more generally, it’s a super interesting area and it raises all sorts of questions. One is around our inability to track, respond, and understand this and integrate this into the wider climate movement.
There are a bunch of climate campaigners who are now having to think in slightly more intersectional ways trying to integrate the emissions from militaries in peacetime and in war, the emissions from conflict into how we’re thinking about the climate crisis and how we respond to it.
There’s big questions around accountability of like whose emissions are these? Are these all Russia’s emissions because it started the war in the case of Ukraine, for example? What does accountability even look like when, as we discussed, trying to get accountability for environmental damage like conflict, pollution or similar is incredibly difficult. So then how do we get to the stage where we’re thinking about protection of our shared common environment from additional emissions into the common atmosphere, and what does accountability look like in that context?
08:02
Dominic Bowen
Noting what you’ve just said, and I’m wondering what we’ve learned about the long-term risks. Again, if we look at Russia’s attacks on industrial sites, on electricity infrastructure in Ukraine, on soil contamination, often deliberate contamination in Ukraine, what are the long-term impacts that we are predicting or that we understand from conflict?
08:22
Doug Weir
That’s an interesting question as well. We focus on quite immediate issues and on direct acute harms. Actually, what we’re seeing tends to be problems which are going to be around for years, decades even. When we look at World War I battlefields in northern France, there’s still soil contaminated that farmers can’t use, whether it’s from explosive remnants of war or high levels of metals or residues from the destruction of chemical weapons.
So when we look at somewhere like Ukraine, where we’ve had this incredibly long, slow-moving front line which has been grinding through Ukrainian countryside and landscape, huge earthworks and fortifications along the way.
Novel forms of pollution, like millions of kilometers of fiber optic cables, which are now draping the countryside and which will be around in the environment for at least 700 or 800 years, it’s boggling the mind almost trying to think about what this is going to look like. What capacity there is going to be available to address these harms, what’s going to be economic, how much land might just need to be put to one side, perhaps returned to nature because it’s too expensive to decontaminate or to clear explosive remnants of war, there’s huge questions being thrown up around this.
At the moment, obviously, the focus is on the direct impacts of the conflict and Ukraine’s focused on fighting the war, but sooner or later, there’s going to be significant questions for both parties whose environments have been affected by the war.
09:34
Dominic Bowen
Now, when we talk about the environmental impact of conflict, there’s often this focus, like we’ve been discussing, about the carbon footprint of the war, but your work focuses much more broadly on environmental degradation. Can you help us understand the different layers of environmental harm caused by conflict from immediate damage during fighting to the longer term impacts, as well as the different themes and areas of damage that’s caused?
09:57
Doug Weir
When we think about this, our approach is looking at direct and indirect harms. The direct harms are those which we’re most familiar with. It’s the bomb damage, it’s the bombturbation of soils from explosive weapons going through them, it’s the landscape fires, it’s the spills. It’s the mechanical damage from fortifications and the kind of things that commanders in the field, military commanders have a decision over.
Then there’s a whole sweep of indirect harms. These are knock on effects, which might be demographic or social changes that you see during conflict or economic changes. For example, looking at issues like the availability of firewood or gas in a conflict area, when gas supplies run out, people turn to firewood, which then increases deforestation, or when you look at the impact of a conflict on a country, on its systems of environmental governance and management, and they may be making decisions about closing off access to environmental information, about fast-tracking developments because of the nature of a conflict.
When we look at these indirect impacts, it doesn’t just affect the battlefield or the front line. It can affect the entire country and potentially for many years after the conflict as well.
11:06
Dominic Bowen
Now, I’ve seen estimates that militaries account for about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which actually sounds really huge when you think about it, but reporting remains limited and often inconsistent. How significant is the carbon footprint of military activity, and to what extent do gaps in reporting distort our actual understanding? Are there any projects or research tasks in place to actually help fill this gap?
11:29
Doug Weir
So we worked with colleagues in the UK at Scientists for Global Responsibility to develop this estimate of 5.5%, and that’s a best estimate of scope one, scope two, and scope three emissions. That’s direct energy use, but also the emissions from the supply chains of militaries is about the same as civilian shipping, civilian aviation. We had to do some quite challenging experiments, maths and projections to try and figure out that estimate because most militaries do not publish detailed data on their fuel consumption or on their emissions. They have been excluded from the climate mainstream because there was this exemption in the Kyoto Protocol under the Paris Agreement.
Military emissions reporting is voluntary, and so we have these big gaps. We’ve tried to document those gaps and looking at what’s reported to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and, when we look at those, we see across the field the top 60 spenders on weapons, these huge gaps in their reporting. It’s not just that they’re not reporting, it’s that stuff’s hidden away in some cases.
We’ve seen year on year increases in military spending, which are projected to continue year upon year in future.
Interestingly, as the rest of society decarbonizes, the contribution that militaries are making will be proportionately larger. It’s a huge challenge for militaries. They are carbon intensive as an industry.
At the moment, they’re locked into technologies which will be used for decades. Like jet fighters, naval vessels, tanks are probably not going to be converted to electric vehicles anytime soon. There’s huge institutional challenges, but one really big one is around transparency and around attention. Because they’ve been excluded from mainstream climate thinking, there is less focus and less demand on them to decarbonise.
There’s this risk that the rest of society decarbonises and it’s the military who are left wedded to fossil fuels, and that’s in itself a security challenge for militaries. There is a justification and a need for them to decarbonize, but obviously a huge amount of pushback at the moment around prioritization.
13:28
Dominic Bowen
I understand all countries are slowly moving towards transparency and reporting, and no one’s really got the gold standard yet. There’s some major emitters like China, Russia, India, Saudi Arabia, with large militaries, who are spending a lot of money on their militaries, that are not reporting anything at all.
What’s the reason for that? Is it difficult to report, or is there a reluctance to be transparent? Why are some countries still not reporting anything?
13:52
Doug Weir
I think there’s a few different issues in here. We look at somewhere like Norway, who have been pretty progressive on this and quite good and open about it. Up until the Trump administration, the DOD published all its data, or most of its data, on scope one and scope two, on its annual fuel use, for example. That stopped under Trump. China looked at that and thought, well, we’re going to copy that, and so they don’t do it either.
We also need to look at the reporting system under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Some countries, the industrialized countries at the time of Kyoto Protocol have to provide detailed emissions reporting every year across the board, others don’t, and that includes on military emissions.
There’s a whole bunch of countries who are now very big arms spenders like Saudi Arabia, like China, who aren’t even obliged to release this data, even if they did want to do so. We have these huge disparities sometimes in national reporting, and then what gets reported to be UNFCCC. So we’ve had situations where the UK MOD, Ministry of Defence, report one number and then report a different one to the UNFCCC.
This whole system is just incredibly impenetrable and problematic, and without transparency, it’s a really important tool to try and drive decarbonisation policies. If you don’t know what you’re emitting, then it’s quite hard to reduce it.
14:57
Dominic Bowen
I’ll take a moment, Doug, just to remind our listeners that if you prefer to watch your podcast, the International Risk Podcast is always available on YouTube. Please do go to YouTube and search for the International Risk Podcast and, if you like it, please subscribe and like our content and maybe even share it with a friend. This really is critical for our long-term success.
Now, Doug, if we look at a few other longer-term historical examples, there’s the oil spill back in 2006 after the Israeli attacks on the country. Then, of course, during the Vietnam War, there was the long-term use of Agent Orange. What do these cases reveal about that persistent use of conflict and the environmental damage coming from military action?
15:36
Doug Weir
One issue which we consistently see is this question of prioritization, and there’s maybe two sides to that. There’s how we as external viewers, observers and the belligerent parties prioritise the environment in terms of moderating our behavior to minimize environmental damage. There’s another one which is around the capacity of countries affected by conflict to manage and deal with the damage which is caused. That’s something which we see in so many cases, countries recovering from conflict have so many priorities, very little economic capacity. They may have lost what environmental and technical expertise they did have during the conflict, particularly if it’s been a long running or persistent conflict.
There’s this question of basically not having the capacity to properly address these issues and so they become very long lasting. There are others like the case of Agent Orange, where we see a lot of focus on US veteran health and a presumption, if people are ill, then they’ve been exposed to Agent Orange, but much less focus on the Vietnamese civilians who are living there, who are still exposed and receive these multi-generational effects, from dioxin exposure linked to that. We also kind of struggle a bit because the approaches post-conflict tend to be quite ad hoc and they quite tend to be quite contingent on the degree of donor interest.
When we compared the situation in Sudan and Ukraine, they couldn’t be more different in terms of the donor interests, engagement, and of the capacity in Ukraine to actually monitor and address environmental issues. When you look at Sudan, there’s been so much less attention, there’s so much less money, yet the environment and natural resources in Sudan have been intimately linked to conflict for decades and will continue to be so after this conflict as well. We see these huge disparities between countries in terms of capacity, attention, donor interest and support.
I guess we come back to this question of accountability for damage as well, that because it’s underdeveloped, we don’t see states chased and forced to deal with the problems that they have caused.
17:15
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, I think your example from Sudan is really interesting, and I understand that at least 40% of all internal conflicts over the last 60 years have been linked to the exploitation of natural resources and that could include timber, diamonds, gold, oil, or scarce resources such as fertile land and water. How much does this feed a cyclic nature of conflict and then the environmental damage when that’s both feeding the conflict, funding the conflict, and then of course the conflict bringing its own environmental damage?
17:42
Doug Weir
Yeah, I think we need to be wary sometimes around simplistic relationships between environmental degradation and the onset of conflict. It’s been something which has been speculated and pushed in the media as quite simplistic narratives in the past. So, around the link between climate crisis and the war in Syria, where it was presented as climate change has caused this conflict, and actually, when you unpack the apparent steps of how climate change causes this, you see that actually, there’s a whole ton of other things in here around governance of the country, around poverty, around inequality, around political control, all of these things.
Perhaps, yes, some signal of climate change, but it’s not so clear cut as the media might suggest and I think quite often when we think that environmental degradation inevitably leads to conflict, then that sort of forces quite maladaptive responses to it. What’s been interesting as well is that, for a number of decades, there was this focus on environmental security risks. That’s going to be superseded to some extent by consideration of environmental peacebuilding, so thinking of how the environment can contribute to peace as a component of recovery post-conflict, or ensuring that there are systems of natural resource management to which are fair and equitable in countries and how that can help contribute to positive peace.
That said, we do see lots of contexts where war causes environmental degradation. Look at somewhere like Iraq, for example, where you had the direct impact of the war and then you had years and years of very poor environmental management as a result of that weak governance system. That ultimately leaves communities more exposed and more vulnerable to environmental change, so to climate shocks. We need to avoid these knee jerk or cliched simplistic explanations for these relationships, really dig down into the weeds and try and unpack what’s actually influencing what, but also being aware that there is this long game in play that we can’t just look at the impact from the damage, from one particular conflict without looking at what comes next 10 years, 15 years down the line, how is it going to be addressed? How is this going to feed into other problems in the community, whether it’s, vulnerability or exposure to crises or other problems.
19:34
Dominic Bowen
And when you look around the world, what are the sort of international risks that concern you the most, Doug?
19:39
Doug Weir
I think one of the key ones which we see linked to conflict is around how geopolitical turmoil impairs international environmental governance. When we look across all the multilateral environmental agreements like climate treaty agreements on biodiversity, on pollution, chemicals, they are all based on consensus. It requires a degree of international cooperation to actually ensure that these things work. When we see these periods of geopolitical turmoil, it potentially upsets our ability to respond to some of these existential problems like the biodiversity crisis, like the climate crisis. That for me is one of the big issues we see. We see national level, regional level, or transboundary harms related to conflict, but when you look at the impact on environmental governance models on multilateralism, that’s where you can see these things being really amplified to the global level.
20:24
Dominic Bowen
Fantastic. Well, look, thanks very much for explaining that, Doug. And thank you very much for coming on the International Risk Podcast.
20:29
Doug Weir
Pleasure. Thanks. Good to talk to you.
20:31
Dominic Bowen
Well, that was a really interesting conversation with Doug Weir, and I really appreciated hearing his thoughts on environmental degradation and the impacts from modern conflict. Today’s podcast was produced and coordinated by Ella Burden. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening.
We’ll speak again soon.
