Armed conflicts are not just a human tragedy. They are also climate tragedies, with short- and long-term consequences for public health, ecosystems, and the environment. In 2024, the world spent a record $2.7 trillion on military expenses, with an increase in spending each year over the past decade and consequently an increasing military carbon footprint.
From Ukraine to Sudan, Gaza, Lebanon, Iran, and Venezuela, as populations suffer from war, bombs, occupation, militarization, and political violence, it is evident that the damage extends beyond the front lines: homes, hospitals, electrical networks, water supply systems, agricultural land, and coastlines are also victims of destruction.
The military carbon footprint: an invisible climate cost
Wars do not just kill people and destroy their homes. They also damage the systems that make life possible, including water supply networks, sewage treatment plants, agricultural land, ports, fuel depots, and electrical infrastructure. This leaves behind ecocide with polluted air, contaminated soil, and unhealthy water long after the hostilities end. Research highlights a common pattern for recent conflicts, based on fires, toxic debris, damaged sanitation systems, collapsed public health systems, and ecosystems pushed beyond the point of no return.
These damages are not coincidental. This is one way war disrupts daily life.
In Iran, just days after the first American-Israeli strikes, energy itself became a battlefield, with attacks targeting fossil fuel-related infrastructure.
The Strait of Hormuz became a hotspot, with dozens of oil tankers carrying billions of liters of oil stranded in the Persian Gulf. Greenpeace Germany warned that a single oil spill in the region could irreversibly damage this fragile marine habitat, with devastating consequences for the local populations, animals, and flora, adding to the human toll the war has already taken among local populations.
In Gaza, analysis by Greenpeace MENA highlighted severe damage to water, sanitation, agricultural land, and fishing, accompanied by estimates that the first 120 days of the war resulted in over half a million tons of carbon dioxide. This combination of bombings, infrastructure collapse, and pollution makes a place more difficult to inhabit, less healthy, and less resilient to climate change.
Sudan offers another striking example: research by the Conflict and Environment Observatory showed that the war led to increased deforestation, declining agriculture, industrial pollution, and the collapse of health and sanitation systems, compromising the populations’ access to food, water, and energy.
The climate cost of war goes beyond the battlefield. Researchers cited by the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) estimate that armed forces account for about 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, with conflicts adding to it through fires, fuel consumption, reconstruction, and destruction of public infrastructure.
War destroys ecosystems and weakens our ability to cope with heat, drought, floods, and future crop losses.
History shows that the damages persist
This is not new. During the Vietnam War, US forces sprayed nearly 80 million liters of herbicides, including Agent Orange, affecting approximately 2.9 million hectares of land and leaving dioxin in the soil, water, and food chains for decades. In Iraq, the United Nations Environment Program, followed by field investigations, warned of long-term risks to the environment and health from contamination by depleted uranium and other war residues. These past conflicts are important because they show that environmental damage does not end with a ceasefire.
The lessons from Vietnam, Iraq, Gaza, and Ukraine are clear. War poisons life itself. It degrades soil, water, air, and health in a way that can affect multiple generations, especially when conflicts involve chemicals, oil, radiation, or the destruction of public infrastructure.
Ukraine assesses Russia’s military carbon footprint
Ukraine has made these damages particularly visible. Greenpeace’s office in Central and Eastern Europe, in collaboration with the Ukrainian organization Ecoaction, published a map of environmental damages based on over 900 recorded cases, with the 30 most severe cases verified by satellite imagery, showing how Russia’s invasion damaged land, habitats, water, and air. Documenting these damages is essential, not only to establish responsibilities but also to plan for the reconstruction and restoration of nature.
Missile strikes trigger forest fires, industrial sites release toxic substances, bombings pollute soil and water, and mined or occupied lands become dangerous to cultivate, restore, or even traverse. This raises a broader question: how can countries affected by war rebuild better, in a way that restores nature and reduces their dependence on vulnerable energy systems that are constant targets of war?
What happens in Ukraine also shows how war amplifies and instrumentalizes risks related to nuclear infrastructures. Our local offices have repeatedly warned of the dangers posed by the Russian occupation of the Zaporizhia nuclear power plant (Europe’s largest nuclear power plant) and the ongoing crisis in nuclear safety and security it has caused. As long as the site remains under Russian army and Rosatom control, there is no justification for restarting the reactors at Zaporizhia, whether in terms of safety, security, or legality. Our on-site teams have warned that any restart would significantly increase the risk of a nuclear catastrophe.
However, this warning extends beyond Ukraine. Nuclear power plants are designed to operate under stable conditions, not to face occupation, militarization, and threats to cooling systems, staff, and external power supply. The example of Zaporizhia shows how war can turn a critical infrastructure into a potential regional environmental disaster, the consequences of which would far exceed borders and the armed conflict.
Environmental damages caused by war are not just a consequence of conflict. They are also determined by energy systems based on fossil fuels that power modern economies.
Oil and gas fuel war and worsen its environmental impact
Oil and gas are not just caught in the crossfire. They are often at the heart of it. Revenues from fossil fuels finance war machines, while control over oil pipelines, ports, tankers, and maritime chokepoints primarily fuels geopolitical conflicts. When the global economy depends on centralized and flammable resources, attacks on depots, refineries, tankers, or sea lanes disrupt not only trade but also threaten marine ecosystems, public health, and economic stability.
This dynamic explains why conflicts related to oil and gas infrastructure often become ecological emergencies. During the 1991 Gulf War, oil wells set on fire in Kuwait darkened the sky and polluted land and water on a massive scale. More recently, Greenpeace Germany showed that the war led by the United States and Israel against Iran, and the subsequent retaliatory strikes across the Gulf, left over 85 large oil tankers stranded in the Persian Gulf and significantly increased the risk of an oil spill. Local populations would be the first to pay the long-term price, as any oil spill would threaten their livelihoods for decades along with the most fragile marine ecosystems, including coral reefs, mangroves, and seagrass beds. The environmental threat is inherent in an energy system that concentrates risks on a handful of highly flammable and highly polluting sites.
A world that revolves around oil and gas turns populations and the environment into sacrificial elements in the names of strategic control and profit. That is why the environmental consequences of war cannot be separated from the fossil fuel extraction economy itself.
The FSO Safer oil tanker in Yemen has become one of the most striking examples of this interaction between fossil fuels, humanitarian crises, and conflicts. This abandoned oil tanker, carrying approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil, threatened for years to cause a major oil spill in the Red Sea, while the war prevented any adequate maintenance or intervention. This imminent catastrophe has now been avoided through a UN-led operation that removed the oil and transferred it to a safer long-term storage facility. What the Safer crisis has shown is how a single abandoned infrastructure in a war-torn area can endanger fishing, food supply, coastal livelihoods, and marine biodiversity across a region.
Renewables are a security imperative
You cannot block the sun’s rays in the Strait of Hormuz or hold the wind hostage on a maritime route. Decentralized renewable energies are harder to bomb or block than massive oil fields, pipelines, and centralized thermal power plants because they do not concentrate the energy system in one place. A decentralized network of solar panels, batteries, local grids, and energy efficiency measures can help maintain the operation of hospitals, schools, and homes, even when national infrastructure is under attack or fuel imports are disrupted.
For all these reasons, the energy transition must also be considered a strategy for security and resilience. Countries that generate their electricity from solar and wind power are less exposed to disruptions in maritime transport, fuel price spikes, and blackmail related to oil and gas imports. Local renewable energy cannot end a war, but it can reduce the influence of fossil fuel lobbies, ensure the operation of essential services, and limit the damage associated with defending centralized fossil fuel-dependent infrastructure.
War not only kills people. The military carbon footprint exists. It also poisons water, degrades soil, pollutes air, and destroys the systems that make daily life possible. It is necessary to put words to this devastation because peace is not just the absence of bombs; it is also the possibility of living on safe, healthy, habitable lands, a principle recognized in human rights to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
Getting rid of fossil fuels helps make this future more accessible by reducing both environmental damage and dangerous dependencies that so often exacerbate conflicts.
Article source written by Mehdi Leman for Greenpeace International
