The Middle East is not cursed by natural resources or doomed to conflict by climate breakdown.
A little before Nowruz, it rained oil in Tehran. People woke up to see cars, trees, blossoms, and street cats covered with brownish black stains.
The midnight before, the skyline was orange. Israeli airstrikes hit the Shahran oil depot on the edge of the city. The depot burned for days, releasing toxic fumes into one of the world’s most air-polluted capitals.
Fires, rubble and dust, and the toxic material in munitions all strengthen the invisible enemy of air pollution. Strikes near nuclear and major industrial facilities have already raised the risk of radiological and chemical contamination.
Industrialised
Furthermore, military emissions of a long conflict will add to climate breakdown, pushing the Middle East towards longer heatwaves and droughts that kill more people long after the bombing stops.
Tehran’s black rain was just a glimpse of what a prolonged war can bring on the Middle East’s already-stressed environment, where civilian infrastructures are military targets. When missiles hit oil tankers, pipelines, refineries, depots, power grid, and desalination plants, the losses far exceed the economic damage.
A long war could cut millions of people off from electricity and drinking water, undermine food security with a fertiliser shock, and trigger irreversible environmental disasters.
As a semi-enclosed and heavily-industrialised ecosystem, the Persian Gulf cannot absorb more pressure.
More than two-thirds of its coral reefs have already disappeared, with the rest at the risk of extinction. Although heat is the primary culprit, oil pollutants are also detrimental.
Destructive
Damages to mangroves and seagrass meadows add further strain. Greenpeace describes the trapped oil tankers in the Persian Gulf as “an ecological ticking time bomb”.
The Middle East is not cursed by natural resources or doomed to conflict by climate breakdown.
The region is already under extremely high water stress. In the six Gulf monarchies, over 60 million people rely heavily on desalinated seawater, 99 per cent of drinking water in Qatar.
Destroying the desalination plants could effectively make cities like Doha, Dubai, and Manama uninhabitable. This is not a natural inevitability, it reflects how the states have organised societies and natural resources around fossil-fuelled growth and militarised security.
Desalination plants supply water for million, but their brine discharge raises localised salinity and temperatures and almost all of these plants run on fossil fuels, adding to emissions.
The scale and form of this environmentally destructive water supply is not dictated by economic necessity or ‘natural’ demographic trends.
Hegemonic
It is consciously built by states to sustain a model geared to recycle petrodollars and control a large inflow of migrant workers who are employed in mega-projects and service sectors of countries with high urbanisation but shallow urbanism.
Iranian dams and their environmental degradation mirror Gulf desalination plants; they are large, expensive, and centralised fixes that hinge everyday survival on infrastructures that are poorly matched with their ecological limits.
The arid Middle East is a fertile ground for environmental determinism, an approach that overlooks external geopolitical dynamics. It also obscures internal contestation and clashing visions of nature and development.
Together, these forces shape an emergent hegemonic ecology, in which a certain image of territory, nature, and communities defines intertwined interests and aligns state, military and market actors around one development path.
So, contrary to a common view, the Middle East is not cursed by natural resources or doomed to conflict by climate breakdown.
Toxic
The problem is a militarised petro-developmentalism that treats land and water as assets and levers of profit and security rather than as conditions for life, and it is this governing model that undermines ecological resilience.
From Iran’s underground missile fortresses to Dubai’s rapid rise as a global aviation and logistics hub, the states in the region have shown they can mobilise huge resources when they choose to; but those choices often favour arms deals, prestige projects, and brittle infrastructure, over sustainability of societies and environments.
Ethnic minorities, migrant workers, and residents of urban peripheries, along with fragile ecosystems and biodiversity, are all treated as expendable, to secure economic growth and project power at home and abroad.
Yet when water dries up, forests burn, air turns toxic, and land is taken, people rise up and disturb the top-down security order, as environmental grievances in Iran’s decade of protests have already shown.
The longer this war drags on, the slimmer the chances of addressing these problems.
Emergencies
Postwar reconstruction is unlikely to prioritise environmental concerns, and a major conflict would almost certainly push governments to double down on defence spending in a region that often has the highest ratio of military spending.
In the long run, such political choices could push the region into an ecological collapse more than any single heatwave or drought.
Recently, Donald Trump, the US President, labelled environmentalists as “terrorists”, echoing the rhetoric of Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, whose intelligence unit arrested members of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation in 2018 and charged them with espionage.
Armies that fight each other also reinforce militarism and shrink the political space for people to dispute how land, water and energy are used.
As this ecosystem of war collides with collapsing environments and mounting emergencies, struggles over ecology, basic political rights and the very possibility of a future in the region become one and the same.
This Author
Dr Maziar Samiee is an associate researcher based at the Centre for Global Political Economy at the University of Sussex.
