The smiles on the faces of Iman Ebrahimi and his colleagues in the photograph are revealing: After more than a month of war in Iran, a tenuous ceasefire in mid-April offered a brief window for the team to travel to one of Ebrahimi’s favorite field sites.
Maharloo Lake is the “hottest spot for flamingo breeding in Iran,” he said excitedly on a video call during a rare period of stable internet early in the war. They saw “at least 5,000” greater flamingos that day, he said, though there were probably more beyond the reach of their binoculars. “It was incredible.”
A salt lake that tinges pink when summer heat shrinks its footprint, the lake was flush with water when they visited. “This is a very lovely place, but I’ve never seen Maharloo like this,” Ebrahimi said. The winter rains had been heavier than normal, to be sure, but he said he also suspects that agricultural and industrial activity, muted by the war, were drawing off less water from the lake — an unanticipated impact.
Ebrahimi and his teammates from the NGO AvayeBoom Bird Conservation Society are doing their best to track the conflict’s effects on Iran’s environment. They’ve noticed, for example, shifts in bird aggregations, apparently moving away from areas that reverberate with airstrikes.
But the war has also laid bare the damage caused by international sanctions imposed by the US, the EU and the UN, along with other moves to cut Iran off from the rest of the world.
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International payments are almost impossible, institutional connections are unstable, internet access is limited or extremely expensive and even staying connected to the global scientific conversation has become a daily struggle.
Iman Ebrahimi, scientist, AvayeBoom Bird Conservation Society
“Iran’s nature, Iranian conservationists and Iranian researchers have been isolated for a long time,” Ebrahimi told Mongabay in an email. “The war has made that isolation more visible, but it did not create it.”
That isolation has blocked funding and diminished the capacity of Iranian scientists while simultaneously stifling their access to opportunities for professional learning. Researchers outside Iran have called for greater inclusivity for the country’s scientific community.
That would not only benefit the people doing science in the country, but it would also be vital to ensuring that global conservation efforts are effective, Ebrahimi said. “What worries me most is that even within the global environmental community, I don’t think we have fully accepted that we cannot ignore some parts of the world and still claim to protect nature globally.”
Meanwhile, peace negotiations stumble on five months after a joint attack by Israel and the US launched the war on Feb. 28.
Connecting people to nature
In 2015, Ebrahimi was one of the co-founders of AvayeBoom, an Isfahan-based NGO where he is currently deputy director. The organisation’s website reflects a birder’s passion, with a carefully cultivated list of Iran’s nearly 600 documented species, including their scientific, English and Persian names. Numerous photos show team members scanning wetlands and waterways with binoculars and spotting scopes during surveys.
The group’s focus centers on “reconnecting people with wetlands through birds,” Ebrahimi said. For more than five years, AvayeBoom has been working with communities around the Arjan wetland, which is part of the UNESCO-listed Arjan and Parishan Biosphere Reserve, in southwestern Iran.
It’s a biodiversity hotspot that’s home to thousands of species, but illegal bird hunting has been a problem. What’s more, livestock have historically overgrazed the surrounding land, and climate change-linked droughts, well drilling, and conversion of former wetland to agriculture have meant that Arjan is now dry for part of the year.
AvayeBoom is trying to protect these spectacular wetlands, which attract bird species by the hundreds and act as vital habitat for migrating waterbirds — while acknowledging the fact that people need to feed their families.
Part of the group’s work involved identifying a “flagship” species with local communities. Drawing on research from as far afield as China and Tanzania, Ebrahimi and his colleagues aimed to connect the people from the region with a culturally significant species that they had a say in selecting as a way of “encouraging environmentally responsible behaviors.” AvayeBoom says it hopes that bird-watching can bring some economic benefits, which could help reduce the push to farm ever-increasing areas of land. And hunters may reconsider taking birds.
But Ebrahimi said the primary goal is to restore the connection between people and nature through a locally important symbol — in this case, the ruddy shelduck — and inspire a steady commitment to conservation that can withstand even the terrors of war.
Today, he said, paintings of the ruddy shelduck, with its crimson and tawny plumage and a trademark neck ring of dark feathers, adorn the walls of schools. And the team now stays with community members when they visit, which Ebrahimi attributes to the organisation’s efforts to encourage conservation at the village level.
“If they care about conservationists, if the people call us to invite us to their homes, we can be sure that they care about wildlife and nature, too,” Ebrahimi said.
But increasingly, Ebrahimi said, there are fewer people working to protect wildlife and ecosystems — a trend the war could exacerbate.
“I’m really worried about extinction — of conservationists,” he said.
Some are no longer in Iran, driven away in part by the lack of support for their work. “If you don’t have funding for more than [a] couple of months, you have to choose whether you go for another job, or you must leave the country.”
Yet another challenge to Iranian scientists has been persecution at the hands of their own government. Five conservationists working to protect the critically endangered Asiatic cheetah in Iran were arrested in 2018 on suspicion of spying on the country’s missile program. Then, on July 1, two of them, Houman Jowkar and Sepideh Kashani, were arrested again by security forces, along with Kashani’s sister, Sima.
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) noted Jowkar and Kashani’s contributions to the cheetah’s survival and asked that they be freed in a statement.
“Houman, Sepideh and Sima have a deep love for their country and its unique natural heritage,” the statement said. “WCS respectfully calls for their prompt release so they may return to their families.”
War and isolation
It’s a problem that scientists outside Iran have started to speak up about.
“What concerns me most is that political conflict and scientific isolation damage not only individual careers, but also the broader body of knowledge in Iran,” Mohammad Reza Farzanegan, an economics professor at Marburg University in Germany, told Mongabay in an email.
Economic sanctions against Iran that are intended to weaken the state often hamper the development of a strong middle class. That includes university professors and researchers and their ability to remain at jobs in academia, Farzanegan said. “Over time, this contributes to brain drain and weakens the long-term scientific and economic development of the country.”
Ebrahimi echoed those sentiments: “When a country becomes scientifically, financially and digitally isolated, it also loses the capacity to see, document and understand what is happening to its own nature.”
For years, Farzanegan has been involved in cooperative projects between universities in Germany and Iran, across disciplines spanning everything from natural resources and disaster management to climate change and water governance. He said these experiences have given him an unvarnished view of the potential that Iranian scientists possess — and the hurdles they face.
“What impressed me most was the quality, seriousness and resilience of Iranian researchers, especially younger scholars working under difficult institutional and political conditions,” he said.
At the same time, Farzanegan noticed that they often lack the “basic conditions for normal research,” whether reliable internet, journal access, or robust banking channels. These are issues that predate the US-Israeli attack on Iran.
“The war has made the problem more visible, but Iranian scientists have faced partial exclusion from the global scientific conversation for many years, despite the significant scientific talent in the country,” he added.
Ebrahimi noted the heavy toll on science. “War makes damage visible. Sanctions and isolation make damage normal,” he said. “They weaken science, conservation institutions, NGOs, field monitoring and international collaboration long before bombs fall.”
US and Israeli military strikes have damaged educational and research facilities and knocked out electricity and telecommunications, crippling research.
In a recent letter published in the journal Science, Farzanegan and a colleague note that the war “has pushed Iran’s scientific community into acute isolation.” To “prevent the collapse of Iranian science,” they laid out a proposal for “a humanitarian corridor for science.”
The researchers outlined ways that the global scientific community can support their peers in Iran amid long-standing sanctions, war and the actions of their own government. Scientists need fellowships and grants, help with visas and collaboration through neutral countries, as well as streamlined access to journals, databases and other resources.
“Such a ‘corridor’ would not mean ignoring legal or security restrictions. It should operate within clear humanitarian and academic safeguards,” Farzanegan said. “The aim is to prevent collective punishment of researchers and students.”
From Ebrahimi’s perspective, this would be helpful. Currently, “International payments are almost impossible, institutional connections are unstable, internet access is limited or extremely expensive and even staying connected to the global scientific conversation has become a daily struggle,” he said in an email.
Still, he added, “I also think the situation is more complicated than simply saying the scientific world has abandoned Iranian researchers. There have been important efforts to keep science partly separate from politics.”
War’s ‘long environmental shadow’
Other researchers have raised concerns about the potential impacts of the war. A recent editorial in the journal Nature Sustainability warned of the war’s “long environmental shadow,” as energy and water infrastructure become common targets in military conflicts.
Another letter in Science detailed the specific impacts the war could have on marine life. There are serious ramifications from oil spills, in particular in the Strait of Hormuz: The waterway and its surroundings provide critical habitat for dugongs and other marine species, noted Ning Wang, a co-author and deputy director of the State Key Laboratory of Marine Resource Utilization in South China Sea at Hainan University in China.
It can take up to five years to completely exchange the water in the two basins that the strait connects, the authors wrote. “Therefore, any pollution here will have severe and serious consequences for marine organisms and the marine ecosystem,” Wang told Mongabay by email.
Wang and his colleagues call for scientific monitoring of oil spills and their impacts. “This conflict is a global test of whether war-related environmental damage can be addressed through scientific assessment and international action,” they wrote.
Ebrahimi said that “real-time tracking” is needed. But, he added, they lack environmental baselines from before the war, and years of sanctions have scuttled adherence to environmental standards by Iran’s oil industry. “In the Strait of Hormuz,” he said, “the environmental problems did not begin with war.”
For Ebrahimi, the war has revealed how ill-prepared science was for conflict. “People around the world see Iran as a country that is always at war,” he said. “But that is not true actually, because I’m 32, and it is the first war I am seeing.”
That need for a better understanding of how nature is faring in Iran has led conservationists with AvayeBoom to work on a new project documenting the war’s impacts on the Arjan wetland because of its critical role as an international flyway for birds. “If we want to conserve them, we must be ready, and we were not ready.”
Continuity is important, Farzanegan said: “Problems such as biodiversity loss, water scarcity, air pollution, climate stress, land degradation, and disaster risk do not stop at national borders.
“As the Persian poet Saadi reminds us,” he added, “human beings are members of one body. When one part is in pain, the others cannot remain indifferent.”
This story was published with permission from Mongabay.com.
