Episode 356: War on the Climate: Conflict, Carbon, and the Hidden Cost of War in Iran with Benjamin Neimark and Frederick Otu-Larbi

This episode hosts Benjamin Neimark and Frederick Otu-Larbi to examine the environmental and climate consequences of modern warfare, with a particular focus on the ongoing conflict involving Iran and its rapidly escalating global impact. The conversation explores how conflict is generating emissions at unprecedented speed and scale, with millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide released in just weeks through fuel consumption, munitions, and the destruction of infrastructure. We discuss how the climate impact of war is measured in practice, breaking it down into pre-conflict preparation, active combat operations, and post-conflict reconstruction, and why these emissions remain largely absent from mainstream policy and security analysis.

The episode also considers the broader environmental implications of targeting energy infrastructure, including oil depots, refineries, and desalination plants, and how these attacks create complex spillovers such as air pollution, water contamination, and long-term ecological damage. A central theme is the disconnect between immediate, visible impacts of war, such as casualties and physical destruction, and the slower, less visible climate consequences that accumulate over time. We also explore how conflict reshapes global energy systems, drives supply chain disruption, and accelerates both fossil fuel dependence and, in some cases, the transition toward alternative energy sources.

Benjamin Neimark is a Professor at Queen Mary University of London whose research focuses on the political ecology of global supply chains, resource extraction, and the environmental impacts of militarisation and conflict. Frederick Otu-Larbi is a researcher at the University of Energy and Natural Resources in Ghana, specialising in the quantification of emissions linked to warfare and reconstruction. Together, their work contributes to a growing body of research seeking to measure and understand the climate cost of conflict, and to integrate environmental considerations into discussions of international security and risk.

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 volatility 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.

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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. 

Transcript

00:00
Benjamin Neimark
We’re seeing fossil fuel infrastructure that is actually being used as a weapon. This of course is causing significant, larger – not just environmental – but a real toxic cloud: pollutants of carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate soot and organic materials. They don’t just go up in the air, they float and they move around and find themselves in water sources.

00:26
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.

00:35
Dominic Bowen
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01:41
Dominic Bowen
In the unfolding conflict in Iran, the environmental consequences are visible, and they’re visible with such striking speed and scale. In just the first two weeks of hostilities, the war is estimated to have generated around 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Now, that’s huge amounts of infrastructure that’s been destroyed. It’s the ignition of fuel deposits and, of course, there’s the massive fuel demands of the military operations on all sides of the conflict. We’ve seen entire neighbourhoods reduced to rubble across the country in Iran, we’ve seen infrastructure set ablaze throughout Gulf states. Not only is the physical landscape being reshaped, but we’re seeing a massive acceleration of emissions and this region that’s already under significant environmental strain.
I’m Dominic Bowen, and I’m host of the International Risk Podcast. Today we’re joined by Benjamin Neimark and Frederick Otu-Larbi, whose work focuses on the environmental and climate dimensions of conflict. Their research really sheds light on these overlooked emissions that are generated by warfare, as well as that hidden cost of infrastructure destruction and the broader implications of climate governance and international security. I think today’s conversation is not only timely, but also critically important when we consider international risk.
Benjamin and Frederick, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.

02:53
Frederick Otu-Larbi
Thank you for having us.

02:55
Dominic Bowen
Whereabouts in the world do we find you both today?

02:58
Benjamin Neimark
I’m here in the UK. I live in Brighton and work at Queen Mary in London.

03:04
Dominic Bowen
Fantastic.

03:05
Frederick Otu-Larbi
I’m in Ghana at the moment, in Sunyani, the University of Energy and Natural Resources presently.

03:11
Dominic Bowen
Well, look thanks very much. I look forward to our conversation today.
Ben, I might start by asking you, when we turn on the news during the conflict, and I know you’ve been on some news channels recently, the focus is typically on geopolitical instability it’s on economic disruption, it’s about the humanitarian crisis. All of those are very, very justifiable topics and topics we should be speaking about. Yet increasingly, I think there’s another topic that’s not getting enough attention, and that’s the environmental and climate costs. So from your perspective and the research you’re doing, how do we define the climate impacts of conflict, especially when we look at the current conflict with Israel and America’s invasion of Iran?

03:49
Benjamin Neimark
This is a really important question, but I do want to stress before we move on, I want to remind everyone that climate emissions calculations, which we are speaking about, there have been a significant number of lives that have been lost to this war, including early on, a Tomahawk that hit a girls’ school.
But on the climate, as it pertains to your question, this is unfortunately bad news as well. This is a super El Niño year, the warming of sea surface temperatures and oscillating currents are going to put us all in a kind of climatically precarious position besides those just in the Gulf.
Antonio Guterres reported that we’re going to see, and already are seeing, significant climate-induced hazards, flooding, drought, fires already in Hawaii and breaking temperatures in the Southwest US. If these conditions continue, like we’re going to find it hard to manage within our already limited carbon budget, to keep global warming to 1.5 and keep it within a safe operating space.
The difference between environmental and security challenges, and of course, humanitarian, are they’re acute, right? They’re direct, they’re in your face. Look at this war, we look at the oil and gas refineries, the smoldering black soot coming out of the Lavan Island sort of oil and gas, liquid natural gas sort of refineries. This is in your face environmental and security challenges. Yet, one rarely thinks about the methane or carbon emissions coming off this. A lot of this, what we call black carbon, or the soot produced during incomplete combustion, these are the acute and in-your-face environmental challenges from particularly this war, other wars as well, but this war in particular.
Yet, the climate conditions are rarely spoken about.

05:37
Dominic Bowen
Fred, I wonder if you can help us further unpack that. In the context of the current conflict involving US and Israel’s attacks on Iran, we’re seeing millions of tonnes of emissions generated in just weeks. Recent analysis suggests that infrastructure destruction, particularly urban damage and attacks on energy facilities, is a significant climate risk as well. Can you help us understand and unpack the main sources of emissions in warfare and how they all interact together?

06:04
Frederick Otu-Larbi
For our kind of analysis, we usually categorize war activities into three broad categories. We do a pre-war emissions, we do the emissions from war activities itself, and then the reconstruction emissions.
So in terms of pre-war emissions, we are looking at defenses. For example, walls, built to keep enemies out, defensive structures that would be constructed prior to the conflict starting. Then the war activities, that’s to do with fuel usage, materials that are being used, so the munitions that are being dropped, the aircrafts that have to fly, losses of equipment. For example, in the current conflict, there’s been several aircrafts and other warships that have been lost. All of that go into our wartime emissions calculation.
Then there’s the post-conflict reconstruction. So in the course of the conflict itself, several buildings are damaged. In Iran, for example, we’ve seen schools being hit, we’ve seen churches and so on being hit. That means that, at the end of the conflict, these are likely to be rebuilt.
So we calculate the embodied emissions from these buildings. Those broadly are the three main categories of emissions that we look at within the scope of conflict emissions that we work on.

07:26
Dominic Bowen
We’ve seen that direct targeting of oil depots and energy infrastructure, and some of these absolutely catastrophic looking fires occurring throughout the Gulf states and in Iran. We see the fires, we see the potential spills contributing to what I imagine is very significant emissions. Ben, to what extent does the targeting specifically of fossil fuel and energy infrastructure create significant or special environmental risks, especially in such a fragile ecosystem like the Persian Gulf?

07:55
Benjamin Neimark
Yeah, this is a good question. It’s interesting when Fred and I and colleagues, Patrick Bigger from the Conflict and Community Institute in the US, we have quite a diverse group within what we call the military missions gap, which is a network of people who are looking at this. We’re constantly curious on what’s the difference between this war and Ukraine or Gaza? Every war is different. It’s a different geographic scope, the topography is different, the types of warfare is different.
One thing that’s quite constant we see the use of drones now, right? What we call modern warfare versus a more traditional legacy warfare. One thing that is quite constant is the fact that we’re just so tied to fossil fuel infrastructures, and this one in particular has been really fascinating in a sense that it’s really acute. We’re seeing fossil fuel infrastructure that is being targeted, actually being used as a weapon.
This of course is causing significant, larger, not just environmental but a real sort of toxic cloud of pollutants, of carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, particulate soot, and organic materials. All these trace metals, they don’t just go up in the air, they float, and they move around, and they find themselves in water sources and this smoke travels. So we’re finding ourselves, although we’re becoming good at sort of developing methodologies in terms of studying the carbon equivalency and greenhouse gas emissions of war, every war we study from Gaza and colleagues in Ukraine, which came out with the new fifth assessment of the invasion of Ukraine, and now Iran are all different challenges.
One of the big things here, we’ve seen attacks on desalinization plants. This is where 40% of the Gulf gets its water. I mean, even at its height in the Gaza attacks by the IDF and reprisals, the Israelis left the desalinization plants alone. So this war in particular has been targeted in terms of civilian infrastructure. As Fred said before, these reconstruction figures are incredibly high even within the first 14 days.

09:51
Dominic Bowen
Ben, you mentioned something at the start of the conversation, and I want to come back to that because it’s really important. There was the girls’ school that was struck. We know that there’s been thousands of dead and injured in Iran as well as people injured and killed throughout the Gulf states. We know in Lebanon, 1.2 million people have been displaced in Lebanon because of the ongoing conflict.
Now, that makes sense. Most people understand war in terms of casualties and death tolls. They understand that Ukraine has really made this you very painful and brought it home to all European countries in terms of territory and, of course, when we look at tensions in the South China Sea around Taiwan, we understand conflict in terms of deterrence.
But we’ve been talking about climate events and the climate impact. How do we bring that into the conversation? What role should climate have when assessing the impact and whether conflict is the right course of action? Of course, many people will say conflict is never the right course of action, but the fact is nearly all presidents, at least of the USA, have declared some sort of war during their time as presidents. How do we measure and how do we incorporate climate into our common understanding of just casualties, territory and deterrence?

11:00
Benjamin Neimark
Yeah, it’s a great question, maybe Fred has something to say about this too in response. Environmental assessments are done to a certain degree. I don’t think the run-up to this war, there was much planning in terms of what normal war planning would take place.
Most of it entails casualties and economic costs, mainly economic costs to the country waging the war, but also the country that the war is being waged on. Within the US and also Western countries, there are assessments to a certain degree. Environmental assessments will be done in terms of if war is being waged in a space where there’s industrial activity.
What would more typically be an energy airline being knocked offline or again a desalinization plan, what are the environmental effects of that, they are built and rooted within an economic costing. What we’re pushing for here and something that Fred and I have been kind of speaking about for some time, I was at COP28 Dubai a very strange place to have COP, it was a month after the attacks of Hamas into Israel and October 7 attacks, and then the multiple reprisals that were going on. It was hanging on everyone’s shoulder, but no one was talking about the climate impacts of the war. This is what really started Fred and I thinking about, well, let’s start calculating this and how do we calculate this?

12:20
Frederick Otu-Larbi
Before I come to this, I just wanted to perhaps tie in the environmental aspect that, in addition to the direct deaths from the conflict itself, thousands in Gaza, thousands in Iran, and so on, you also need to factor in the long-term health impacts because all of these pollutants that are going into the atmosphere are going to affect people’s health. The WHO estimates that up to 8 million people die every year from air pollution related causes, and so, if you’re putting so much pollution in the atmosphere through the bombing of fuel storage sites, energy sites, and so on, that a lot of pollution going into the atmosphere and that puts people, especially the aged and children, at greater risk of respiratory diseases. We may be counting the direct deaths from conflict now, but we also need to start to think about the long-term impact on people or the indirect health impacts on people through things like the air pollution.
Coming back to your question on how do we get the climate into this these discussions, I think one of the issues was really getting the evidence or getting the numbers out. That has been missing from past conflicts. There hasn’t simply been the work done to quantify how much emissions were coming out of conflicts until recently, until the Russian-Ukraine war and then our work on Gaza. That evidence is beginning to build, and there’s quite a lot of enthusiasm, I would say, from the scientific community and from the media also.

13:49
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, thanks very much for raising that, Frederick. I’d love to hear more about the long-term impacts of climate emissions and the destructions coming from conflict.
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Now, Fred, you talked about the long-term impacts, I think that’s critically important. A lot of attention, and our discussion so far, has been on the emissions caused from the active conflict, but you started to talk about the longer-term impacts, and I think this is incredibly important, especially in that post-conflict reconstruction phase.
Can you tell us, how do we encourage discussion? We’re all too quick with our news cycles to move on from the current conflict and start looking at the next conflict, and the next issue. How do we turn that into a conversation about the long-term impacts of the conflict there?

14:51
Frederick Otu-Larbi
As I indicated, one of the major sources of emissions during the conflict is the reconstruction, damaged buildings, and the environmental cost of just moving the debris is quite massive on its own. So one way to think about this is how do we build back after the conflict, do we build back better? A few years ago, ‘Build Back Better’ was a popular slogan politically, but it could be an important step. If you take Gaza, for instance, before the war, 25% or more of their energy was coming from solar panels.
Now, all of that is gone, that needs to be built back. Do you go back to a different source of energy? Are they are they going back to, say, fossil fuels?
If that becomes the case, if it actually worsens the emissions post-conflict, if there’s a shift towards a greener future, greener building technology, and so on, then we could potentially limit some of the emissions that would be released as a result of reconstruction. So we need to factor in that definitely these cities, Iran needs to rebuild its infrastructure after the war, Gaza needs to be rebuilt because millions of people are displaced. How do we build back, it sounds a bit weird, but do we use this as an opportunity to shift towards a greener future?

16:15
Dominic Bowen
And Benjamin, I’m wondering if you’ve looked beyond the immediate conflict zone. I don’t think there’s anyone left in the world who doesn’t know where the Strait of Hormuz is today, but I’m wondering beyond that. I mean, just this morning, I was speaking to colleagues in the Philippines. They were just talking about the very real difficulties that families are having just moving around big cities like Manila now. So beyond the immediate conflict zone, how do wars like the current war in the Persian Gulf reshape global energy systems? There’s the supply disruptions, there’s the shifts in oil flows, there’s the potentially an increased reliance on alternative fuels, some of them good, some of them heading back to black and brown coal. What should we be paying attention to and what sort of predictions are you willing to make right now?

16:58
Benjamin Neimark
One prediction I’m willing to stick my neck out on is that there will be quite a bit of stockpiling. One of the things that we’re particularly looking at right now is quite interesting, a hot topic with the Trump initiative of stockpiling critical minerals, is what is stockpiling going to look like right now? Like people are now jolted right again by supply chain issues. Again, layered on top of resource nationalism or a mercantile capitalism where you have this return to national interests, you’re going to have a significant amount of stockpiling of energy sources and resources, fertilizers, they don’t want to get caught up.
The problem is many of these countries don’t have the infrastructure to stockpile. Even the US, you could see them scrambling, trying to stockpile for what might be supply chain issues and future sort of trade disruptions. One of the reports that came out, a really great article that used our work, was a Bloomberg article about gas flaring.
Many of these countries in the Gulf, these petrostate, these countries that do have infrastructure to move, to process, refine, and move oil and gas still are not built for supply chain disruptions like this. They’re built to take fossil fuels out of the ground, refine them, store them for a limited, and get them through the pipeline. So now they’re left with all this kind of storage and are having to do extra gas flaring, which is causing a significant amount of methane. So you’re seeing these disruptions, you’re seeing these strange knock-on effects from this, what it would be probably is going to be, in terms of future thinking, both stockpiling, but also alternative energy thinking.
What does that mean in terms of using more renewables? So you have these challenges, then you get the debates that are brought back up about North Sea oil, you have, a return to this kind of fallacy that somehow fossil fuels are so are constant and in our future. But, in reality, if you look at the countries that are really future planning and de-risking, they are relying more and more on renewables. As you said, if there’s one constant in modern warfare is that it’s tied to fossil fuels. These long tail of supply chain emissions, you’re going to see quite a bit of replenishment of these stocks of weaponry. There’s going to be hidden cost of this war in terms of this industrial long tail of restocking and resupplying.

19:36
Dominic Bowen
And Fred, I wonder, the United States, by far, is the world’s largest military power and ipso facto the world’s largest military emitter. Yet, climate considerations rarely appear at the centre of security decision making in the USA. Under the current administration in the US, we’ve seen a rollback of environmental commitments broadly. I’m wondering about the extent that major powers factor environmental costs into military strategies, I’ve seen research that says militaries around the world account for about five and a half percent of global greenhouse gas emissions which to me sounds quite significant. So are there any militaries around the world actually including the environment and climate change in their decisions around conflict and military procurement and their activities, or is that just not part of their decision making process right now?

20:27
Frederick Otu-Larbi
There isn’t any strong evidence of militaries planning with climate in conflict part of the conflict-based planning. We need to also think about the role of the military broadly within society. For example, in in the UK, there’s been several instances where there’s been floods and the military has had to step in to help with rescue and so on. Generally governments in India’s adaptation plans tend to have some role for their militaries in responding to climate crisis, rather than in planning to stop the climate crisis within the military itself.
The military’s role is seen more in terms of dealing with the aftermath of crisis. So if there’s a hurricane, or there’s flooding, or there’s some other heat wave, then the military, because they are able to move logistics and equipment really quickly, are brought in to deal with the aftermath. So there’s some planning for the military in that regard, but in terms of actually making wars greener.

21:28
Benjamin Neimark
You bring up a really excellent point here. We need to think about militaries more broadly, not just as first responders, their roles in society.
Besides war, there’s a significant carbon blueprint of just militaries as day to day operators there. Training missions and their role in wider society, which all has its carbon costs.
We focus on conflict emissions because of the intensity and the just total absence of the measurement. Taking a step back, it might seem quite dire now to think about the relationship between climate change and militaries in a kind of Trump 2.0 era where they they’ve stepped back from the Paris Climate Agreement, they’ve sanitized the websites, their EPA administrator just attended the most climate denial conference. I mean, it almost seems incredibly dire, but let me just reflect some reality here.
Militaries are very concerned about climate change. They cannot land an F-35 on a melted tarmac, or to drive a Humvee out of flood zones. These are all the relationship between militaries and climate change that cannot be devoid of. So the idea that, even Hegseth said himself, we need to keep an eye on extreme weather. What he’s saying is that climate change is a reality that militaries are going to have to contend with.

22:51
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, really interesting. Thanks very much for raising that, Ben. Fred, I wonder when you look ahead, what are the environmental and climate-related risks linked to conflict that concern you the most?

23:03
Frederick Otu-Larbi
The more conflicts we have and, to all intents and purposes, all future conflicts are going to be more intense.
We saw on the first day of this conflict, Iran sending out hundreds of drones that requires hundreds of interceptor missiles, that’s huge emissions on a single day. As conflicts continue into the future, there will be more drones coming up. That means more interceptors and most likely going to involve a lot of targets. The emissions are just going to continue to scale up really, really rapidly. That’s something to be concerned about. Especially if we keep in mind the fact that we’ve got a carbon budget we’re working with here. we need to keep an eye on our carbon budget.
I don’t think we can afford a luxury of wasting it on conflicts, so it’s the sheer scale of the emissions and the environmental damage that’s of concern to me, of course, the lives is the primary concern, but the sheer scale of the environmental cost is massive.

24:00
Dominic Bowen
Yeah, thanks very much for explaining that. I think that’s a really great point. And thank you very much, Ben and Fred, for coming on the podcast today.

24:09
Frederick Otu-Larbi
Yeah, thank you very much for hosting us.

24:13
Dominic Bowen
Well, that was a great conversation with Benjamin Neimark and Frederick Otu-Larbi. I really appreciated hearing their thoughts on the environmental impacts of the US-Israeli war in Iran and the multifaceted nature of international risks caused by conflict.
Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Ella Burden. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening to the International Risk Podcast. We’ll speak again very soon.