War, economic crisis threaten Iran's endangered wildlife conservation efforts

Reza Kiamarzi, a veterinarian who studies birds of prey, made a difficult decision in the spring of 2026. Days after the United States and Israel began military operations against Iran, he decided to climb into the mountains outside Isfahan. His target was specific: the cliff nests of two endangered falcon species—the Saker and the red-naped Shaheen—birds that rank among the fastest fliers on earth. The timing was terrible. The bombardment had struck during the birds' breeding season, and two nests he knew of sat near military installations that had been hit. He wanted to understand whether the explosions, the vibrations, the noise itself had harmed the birds as they laid eggs or tended chicks. The climb itself was punishing: hours to reach the cliff base, then technical rock climbing to the nests themselves.

What Kiamarzi discovered in those nests matters because Iran's wildlife crisis has become a collision of three separate catastrophes. The country, roughly two and a half times the size of Texas, contains extraordinary biological diversity. The Caspian Sea region in the north is heavily forested and wet. The Persian Gulf coast is scorched and arid. Between them run two massive mountain ranges—the Zagros and the Alborz—creating a patchwork of climates that makes Iran a critical stopover for migratory birds traveling between Eurasia and Africa. Yet at least 86 animal species now face extinction: the Asiatic cheetah, Persian fallow deer, brown bear, leopard, black bear, Persian onager, the great bustard, and various raptors. Before the war, conservationists were already struggling with decades of international sanctions, a climate crisis that had dried the country's fragile water sources, and a population that had swelled from roughly 73 million people twenty years ago to over 93 million today.

Then came the airstrikes. Jamshid Parchizadeh, an Iranian wildlife expert now working at Michigan's Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, fears the bombing of military facilities in desert and mountain regions has degraded habitats critical to endangered cheetahs and other large predators. The strikes cause water pollution, soil contamination, destruction of vegetation—the basic architecture of survival for animals that have nowhere else to go. Bombing also drives wildlife away. A bear or leopard living in the mountains, once startled by explosions, may abandon that territory forever, driven by fear into areas where it cannot survive. Parchizadeh studied these populations before leaving Iran in 2022; he knows the math of their decline.

The economic dimension has become equally severe. Iran's currency has lost more than half its value in the past year. That collapse has created a perverse incentive: smugglers now traffic in falcons, selling them to wealthy buyers in the Arab Gulf states who pay in hard foreign currency. Before the war, military zones had paradoxically become some of the safest breeding grounds for these birds—secure areas where poachers and smugglers feared to tread. Now those sanctuaries have been compromised. Access to critical wildlife sites on Persian Gulf islands has become nearly impossible. Two of the most important islands for biodiversity sit near Iran's oil infrastructure, and fighting has continued even after a preliminary ceasefire in April. An oil slick reached at least one site on the tiny uninhabited island of Shidvar, a crucial breeding ground for turtles and tens of thousands of birds.

Iman Ebrahimi founded AvayeBoom, a conservation group based in Isfahan whose name means "The Earth's Cry" in Persian. He speaks with the exhaustion of someone watching his work unravel in real time. "It's a big question how much longer we and other conservation NGOs can keep working," he said. "We're waiting every moment to see what happens." The organization relies on local funders who are themselves being crushed by the currency crisis. Sanctions effectively prevent Iranian NGOs from accepting international donations. The first worry, Ebrahimi said, is that economic desperation will simply erase environmental protection from the list of things people care about.

Yet there are small signs of resilience. Four years ago, AvayeBoom launched a campaign to reconnect residents around the Arjan protected area—a vast wetland territory in the southern province of Fars—with the wildlife around them. They chose the ruddy shelduck, a water fowl with vivid orange plumage that locals already knew. They held workshops. They painted a mural of the bird on a main street. After the ceasefire, when members returned to the village, they found something unexpected: the campaign had worked. Recognition of the bird had grown. More importantly, residents reported that they considered the nearby wetlands and wildlife very important to them, even after months of war. A wildlife photographer who documents birdlife on the Persian Gulf coast, speaking anonymously out of security concerns, said she had stopped her work in recent months but planned to resume if the peace deal holds. The connection between people and nature, she said, is one of the real dangers of losing in a conflict like this.

Iran was one of the first countries in the world to establish an environmental protection agency, doing so just a year after the United States created its own in 1970. The country's traditional arts—carpet-weaving, painting—have long featured animal motifs like the Persian lion, extinct in Iran for over seventy years. That cultural memory of wildlife remains. Whether it will be enough to sustain conservation work through economic collapse and the aftermath of war is the question conservationists are asking themselves every day.