Iran's President Masoud Pezeshkian has told the COP31 climate conference that his country wants compensation for environmental damage caused by American and Israeli strikes, in a speech that brought the war with the United States and Israel directly into the heart of the United Nations climate summit. Speaking in Antalya, Turkey, on Wednesday, Pezeshkian said the damage was part of the global fight against climate change, and called on the international community to establish a mechanism to assess it and to pay for it.
"We expect the global community to establish a genuine and meaningful link between climate commitments in times of peace and responsibility in times of war, to document and assess the environmental damages caused by military aggressions and to develop compensation mechanisms," Pezeshkian said. His comments were part of back-to-back speeches by heads of state on the third day of the two-week conference.
Pezeshkian put figures on the damage, citing assessments that have not been independently verified. He said American and Israeli attacks on fuel facilities in Iran had released 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, including 500,000 tons from attacks on facilities at Asaluyeh alone. He accused the United States and Israel of inflicting severe environmental damage during their campaign against Iran, releasing massive quantities of pollutants and greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
"The recent criminal and illegal aggression against Iran by America and the Zionist regime has inflicted severe damage on the environment," Pezeshkian said, using the term the Iranian leadership applies to Israel. The United States and Israel launched a military campaign against Iran in late February, and the war has dominated the background of the climate summit, with several leaders using their speeches to address it.
Iran's presence at COP31 has been one of the most striking features of the summit. The Iranian national pavilion has been given over to a memorial to the children killed when an American-Israeli bombardment destroyed their school in February, with broken school benches, a pink backpack and pictures of children who were among the 168 people Iran says died in the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School in Minab, in southern Iran.
Pezeshkian arrived in Antalya on Wednesday morning, and has held a series of bilateral meetings on the sidelines of the summit, with the leaders of Iraq, Norway, Armenia and Pakistan, among others. He met Pakistan's Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif, and the two leaders reaffirmed the close ties between their countries and agreed to strengthen cooperation. Iran is participating in the summit with a delegation that includes the president and officials and experts from various sectors, including the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran.
The Turkish hosts have also used the summit to address the war. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan called the war in Gaza an "ecocide" in his speech at the conference, a remark that drew a furious reaction from Israel, which was not invited to COP31. The conference, which began on 9 November and continues until 20 November, has become a diplomatic stage as much as a climate negotiation, with the wars in the Middle East and in Ukraine competing for attention with the climate agenda.
The number of world leaders attending the summit is significantly down on previous years. Around 80 leaders have come to Antalya, far fewer than the 120 who came to Glasgow for COP26, and only one leader from a G7 country, Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham, is attending. The United States has declined to send a delegation for the second year running. Yet the number of participants overall is higher than ever, with the United Nations confirming that 92,934 people have registered to attend.
For Iran, the summit is an opportunity to make its case to the world. Pezeshkian's demand for compensation is unlikely to be met, but it puts the environmental cost of war on the agenda of a conference that is supposed to be about the environment. The argument, that military aggression should be treated as a climate issue, is one that Iran will continue to press, and it is one that resonates with countries that have themselves suffered from war.
Whether the demand leads anywhere will depend on the negotiations that continue in Antalya over the next week. For now, Pezeshkian has made his point, and he has done so on the world's biggest climate stage, in front of the leaders of nearly 200 countries. The war, he has told them, is not just a political crisis or a humanitarian one. It is an environmental one too, and it should be paid for.
