Reports of “black rain” over Tehran after strikes on oil facilities make visible what we too often treat as secondary: modern conflict can rapidly become a chemical exposure crisis. Warfare exacts a chemical toll. We see this in attacks on oil refineries, fuel depots, ports, power stations and pipelines in Iran, Russia, Yemen and elsewhere.

The World Health Organization warns that the resulting toxic air pollution and highly acidic, oil-contaminated rainfall can pose serious health risks. Wars are not isolated environmental incidents. They expose a gap in how the world governs hazardous chemicals, industrial assets and conflict risk.

Petrochemical facilities are only one part of the problem. Facilities across the broader chemicals sector can, under conflict conditions, become uncontrolled release points for complex toxic mixtures.

Conflict sensitivity

Major accident frameworks provide a foundation require companies and governments to prevent industrial incidents, assess hazards and prepare emergency responses. However, these emerged primarily around accidental releases occurring within functioning regulatory, emergency and industrial systems.

Armed conflict creates additional conditions that conventional major accident planning may not fully anticipate. These include repeated or deliberate damage, prolonged loss of electricity and water, inaccessible sites, absent personnel, disrupted communications, overwhelmed health services, population displacement and the collapse of monitoring and enforcement capacity.

‘Safer chemical substitution is also a conflict-resilience strategy’

Chemical safety should therefore build upon, and extend beyond, conventional major accident prevention and emergency preparedness. Governments and companies must also consider how safeguards perform when essential services fail and facilities cannot be safely accessed. Public authorities can lose operational capacity, or communities may be displaced without reliable information about exposure.

Conflict sensitivity is an established concept concerned with understanding and minimising harmful interactions within conflict environments. Applied to chemicals and industrial infrastructure, conflict sensitivity means assessing how warfare could alter a facility’s hazard profile.

For chemical companies, this includes reducing inventories of highly hazardous substances; identifying safer substitutes; protecting or remotely isolating critical systems; planning for prolonged power, water and staffing disruptions; establishing secure communication with authorities and surrounding communities; preparing non-sensitive public-warning information; protecting environmental and health data from military misuse; and defining responsibilities for monitoring, remediation and compensation before a crisis occurs.

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Conflict conditions pose questions for investors

Investors already ask companies about systemic risks. But they should also ask whether existing safety systems remain credible under conflict conditions:

• Can companies safely reduce or isolate hazardous inventories if a site becomes inaccessible?
• Can containment systems operate during prolonged power or water failure?
• Are emergency plans workable when personnel, regulators and responders cannot reach the facility?
• Can communities receive trusted warnings without disclosing information that creates additional security risks?
• Who will finance monitoring, remediation and compensation if repeated damage causes contamination beyond the facility boundary?

Policymakers cannot treat chemical regulation, humanitarian response and peacebuilding as separate worlds. Chemical regulation focuses on substances and markets. Humanitarian systems focus on immediate survival. Peace and security actors focus on ceasefires, military conduct and reconstruction.

When chemical and industrial infrastructure burns, these boundaries collapse. One strike can become many crises at once: a military incident, an industrial disaster, an air-pollution emergency, a public-health crisis and a long-term contamination problem.

A practical agenda for infrastructure

Make safer substitution a resilience strategy: We usually frame safer chemical substitution as a sustainability issue. But it is also a conflict-resilience strategy. The fewer highly hazardous substances we build into industrial systems, the less toxic those systems become when they fail, burn or are attacked. A safer chemical economy is better for workers, consumers and ecosystems in peacetime. It is also less dangerous in wartime.

Map foreseeable chemical risks: Conflict-sensitive chemical-risk mapping should become standard for high-risk industrial zones. Precaution requires identifying toxic risks before civilians are exposed, not reconstructing them afterwards from smoke plumes, hospital records and satellite images. Modern warfare exacts a chemical toll.

Establish rapid, near-real-time, sustained monitoring: Humanitarian preparedness and response should integrate air-quality and chemical-exposure monitoring. Civilians in conflict zones should not have to rely on rumours or the smell of chemicals to know whether air or water is dangerous.

Treat toxic exposure as part of civilian protection: Emergency response must include respiratory health support, clear protective guidance, clean indoor-air options and practical safe-water advice. Rapid testing, sealed or tested water sources, evacuation support, targeted support for children, older people, pregnant women and people with chronic illness should become part of toxic-exposure response.

Rebuild without recreating the same risks: Reconstruction should not simply restore the hazardous conditions that made communities vulnerable in the first place.

A responsibility to act

Modern warfare exacts a chemical toll. The black rain over Tehran, the fires at Tuapse and other attacks on petrochemical and energy infrastructure are warning signs, not isolated events. They should force a new conversation among chemical companies, investors, governments, humanitarian actors and peacebuilders.

Chemical companies, investors and policymakers have real agency before disaster strikes. They cannot prevent every conflict. But they can:

• Reduce dependency on hazardous chemicals
• Support safer alternatives
• Require conflict-sensitive disclosure
• Strengthen emergency planning
• Demand credible remediation plans
• Make toxic exposure risk part of corporate and financial decision-making.

We usually count war in deaths and displacement. But some of its most enduring harms are quieter. The smoke will disperse – often, the chemicals will not. The responsibility to act must not disappear with the plume.

Karen J. Cloete is affiliated to the UNESCO-UNISA Africa Chair in Nanosciences & Nanotechnology and African Center of Competencies in Enhanced Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies FOR SDGs (ACCENTS) at the University of South Africa and Nanosciences African Network (NANOAFNET) at the iThemba Laboratory for Accelerator-Based Sciences-National Research Foundation, South Africa