The Iran war has already emitted more carbon than 84 countries produce in a year
By Daily Direct Team · 22 March 2026
Wars are measured in casualties, in territory, in economic damage. Almost never in carbon.
A first-of-its-kind analysis published this week has calculated the greenhouse gas emissions from the first 14 days of US and Israeli military operations against Iran. The number is 5 million tonnes of CO2.
In two weeks. From one conflict.
That is more than the combined annual emissions of 84 countries. It is roughly equivalent to the yearly carbon footprint of a mid-sized European nation. And the conflict is now entering its fifth week, with no ceasefire in sight, escalating to new fronts, and drawing in additional military assets from multiple nations.
The climate cost of this war is not a footnote. It is a story that has been almost entirely absent from the coverage.
Where the emissions come from
Military operations are among the most carbon-intensive activities humanity undertakes, and modern air campaigns are particularly extreme.
A single B-52 strategic bomber burns approximately 86,000 litres of fuel per flight. An aircraft carrier battle group — the kind the US has deployed to the Persian Gulf — consumes roughly 5,000 tonnes of fuel a day. Cruise missiles, manufactured from energy-intensive materials and propelled by solid rocket fuel, have a substantial carbon footprint even before they detonate. The munitions themselves — the bombs, the missiles, the artillery — require enormous energy to produce and transport.
Then there is the infrastructure cost: the bases, the logistics chains, the constant surveillance flights, the resupply missions. The US military is the single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels on earth in peacetime. In wartime, that consumption accelerates dramatically.
The analysis that produced the 5-million-tonne figure examined airstrikes, naval operations, drone campaigns, and associated logistics over the conflict's first two weeks. The researchers used established methodologies for military emissions accounting — a discipline that has existed for years but rarely penetrates public debate, because military emissions are explicitly excluded from national reporting requirements under the Paris Agreement.
That exclusion is not accidental. It was negotiated at the insistence of major military powers, including the United States.
The accounting gap nobody talks about
When governments report their greenhouse gas emissions to the United Nations, military operations are carved out. Fuel burned by fighter jets on combat missions does not appear in a country's official carbon accounts. Bombs manufactured and detonated do not appear. Naval vessels running at combat tempo do not appear.
This is not a minor rounding error. The US military alone — in peacetime — produces more greenhouse gas emissions than most countries. The Pentagon's annual fuel consumption exceeds that of many industrialised nations. When the US goes to war, those numbers spike, and none of it counts toward the commitments made in Paris, Glasgow, or Dubai.
The logic, such as it is, was that including military emissions would create perverse incentives — countries might hesitate to deploy forces for legitimate security purposes if doing so blew their carbon budgets. In practice, the exemption has functioned as a blank cheque that removes an entire category of human activity from climate accountability.
There have been calls to close this gap for years. None have succeeded.
Nuclear anxiety and a new kind of escalation
The climate story collides this week with a development that has alarmed analysts across the world.
Iran struck the Israeli towns of Dimona and Arad — both located near Israel's Negev Nuclear Research Center — injuring more than 100 people. It is the first time missiles have landed near Dimona in the conflict. Israel, hours earlier, had struck Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment facility.
Neither side has acknowledged what the implications of a strike on an active nuclear facility might be for the surrounding environment — the radioactive contamination risk, the long-term soil and water consequences. The international community has focused, understandably, on the geopolitical implications of nuclear sites being targeted. The environmental dimension has received almost no attention.
Trump has now issued a 48-hour ultimatum: reopen the Strait of Hormuz or face strikes on Iranian power infrastructure. Iranian power plants, if struck, would release their own contamination risks depending on fuel source and facility condition. The conflict is approaching a threshold where its environmental consequences become not just atmospheric but potentially radioactive.
The war's carbon cost in context
Five million tonnes of CO2 in 14 days. To make that concrete:
The entire nation of New Zealand emits approximately 34 million tonnes of CO2 per year — meaning the first two weeks of this conflict produced the equivalent of roughly 18 per cent of New Zealand's annual total. Portugal emits around 46 million tonnes annually. Iceland emits just 3.5 million. Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania combined emit less than 30 million.
The 84 countries whose combined annual emissions were exceeded in 14 days of conflict include much of sub-Saharan Africa, most of the Pacific island nations, and large parts of Central America — countries that have contributed almost nothing to historical emissions and are among the most vulnerable to climate change.
They are also, almost without exception, countries with no meaningful influence over whether this war continues.
The silence in the climate conversation
The Iran conflict has been covered extensively through economic, geopolitical, humanitarian, and military lenses. Climate coverage has focused, appropriately, on the record March heatwave in the US west, Cyclone Narelle's intensification over warming Queensland waters, and the accelerating loss of sea ice.
The war's direct carbon cost has been largely absent from that coverage, for reasons that are both understandable and revealing. Climate reporters cover emissions from power plants and cars and agriculture. War correspondents cover the conflict. The gap between those beats is where the 5-million-tonne figure sits, largely unexamined.
This matters beyond the immediate accounting. The world's major powers have made commitments to reduce emissions by 2030 and reach net zero by mid-century. Those commitments were made with the implicit assumption that military operations would continue to be excluded from the ledger. But as conflicts multiply — Ukraine, the Middle East, the potential for further flashpoints in the Indo-Pacific — the excluded category keeps growing.
At some point, the gap between what countries promise and what their militaries emit becomes too large to ignore.
What the number means
Five million tonnes of CO2 in 14 days does not change the trajectory of the Iran conflict. It will not influence Trump's 48-hour ultimatum. It will not slow the Israeli strikes or moderate Iran's retaliation.
But it is a number worth knowing, and a number worth demanding be known routinely — not as an antiwar argument, not as a way to adjudicate the conflict's legitimacy, but simply as an accurate account of what modern warfare costs the planet.
The countries most affected by climate change did not start this war. They will not benefit from its outcome. And they will absorb, along with everyone else, the atmospheric consequences of a conflict from which they have been entirely excluded.
That is worth measuring. It is worth reporting. And it is worth asking why it took an independent analysis to produce a number that no government involved thought to calculate — or to publish.
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