As the war in Iran enters its fourth week, the costs are adding up. NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe talks to Doug Weir, with the Conflict and War Observatory, about impacts to human health and the environment.
AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
Since the start of the war in Iran three weeks ago, images of destruction have filled our screens – black smoke billowing over the skyline of Tehran, flames leaping from gas fields in the Gulf. Doug Weir is director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, and he’s been documenting the impacts of the war on ecosystems and human health in the region. Thank you for being with us.
DOUG WEIR: Thanks for having me.
RASCOE: So there was a major escalation in the war last week with strikes directly targeting oil infrastructure. How big of a concern is that from your perspective when it comes to the environment?
WEIR: Typically, these attacks on oil facilities and infrastructure are some of the most environmentally damaging incidents that we see. We see pollution to the air, pollution to the soils and then pollution to water as well.
RASCOE: Much of this war is happening in or very near one of the most populous cities in the world. Tehran has more residents than New York City. So what are some of the effects for people who are living there, both in the immediate and then in the long term?
WEIR: Yeah. So this was probably one of the most worrying incidents we have monitored in the conflict. So overnight, between the 7 and 8 of March, Israel attacked four oil facilities in and around Tehran, which, as you say, has this huge population – around 9 million people. Tehran is backed by mountains, and often during the nights, the atmosphere pushes pollution down into the city. And it’s a city that’s known for poor air quality. And so we had these attacks overnight, and this just meant that the city just filled up with all sorts of unpleasant materials from these fires – carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, soot and trace metals. All of this pollution pushed down into the city and potentially exposing millions of people to acute respiratory risk.
RASCOE: Is that only short-term, or is there a long-term risk from this?
WEIR: So a lot of this pollution will have ended up in soils, potentially ended up in water. So that’s something we should – really need to look into post-conflict, is the extent of this pollution across Tehran and into sensitive places like groundwater aquifers.
RASCOE: What are the risks to the environments when these toxins get into the soil? Do you have any, like, specific examples where we’ve seen damage from war?
WEIR: Yeah. I mean, this region is a great example of environmental damage. So in the late ’80s in the Iran-Iraq War, we see this widespread targeting of oil tankers and oil platforms and huge oil spills. In the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq set fire to around 700 oil wells in Kuwait as they retreated, and these fires burned for months and months on end, creating huge amounts of pollution. So we kind of know what the damage is and what the picture is, and we’ve seen this story before.
RASCOE: And a lot of people have seen maps showing all the ships trapped in the Gulf right now, many of them oil tankers. Have there been any oil spills due to this war?
WEIR: Yeah. I mean, we’ve seen a few spills so far. Luckily, the ships that have been targeted – around 20 ships or so – only a couple of them have been oil tankers and only a couple of those have been full. So we saw some big fires off Basrah after a couple were targeted a few days ago. But we’ve also seen lots of attacks on Iranian naval vessels, which have been sunk. And when you sink ships, they become point sources of pollution.
I think we have really big concerns around what happens next and where we see an escalation in terms of the naval warfare and combat in the Persian Gulf. It’s very shallow. It’s very enclosed. Pollution can’t really go anywhere. There are sensitive ecosystems in there – coral reefs and seagrass beds and sensitive species, and also an awful lot of desalination plants as well, which don’t work properly if they’re having to suck in oil.
RASCOE: ‘Cause the Gulf region is one of the driest regions on the planet, so people rely on desalinated water. What if the plants themselves are targeted? Which I think happened earlier.
WEIR: Yeah. So I think around a hundred million people in the region rely on desalinated water. But at the moment, it seems like it’s something which none of the parties want to really push across in terms of a threshold. If we did see this decision to start targeting plants, it could be, yeah, devastating for communities all the way around the Persian Gulf.
RASCOE: Bigger picture, is there a chance that this conflict could lead countries to invest more in renewable energy, that you could see some countries saying, we need to have more alternative energy so we’re not so dependent on oil and gas?
WEIR: I think it’s a lesson which many countries, more so in Europe, I think, have very much realized that fossil fuels don’t bring security and resilience in the face of these incidents and geopolitical turbulence. Typically, when we have these situations, we see countries shifting on an emergency basis towards other fuels like coal, going back to things which they’ve got access to. But over time, certainly off the back of Ukraine, we saw shifts in national and regional energy policies, which were encouraging decarbonization methods. And I think what we’re seeing now in the Gulf is only going to escalate this and accelerate it.
RASCOE: Doug Weir is director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory. Thank you so much for being with us.
WEIR: Thanks very much for having me.
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