The hidden reach of war and why it doesn’t need to reach your borders to enter your workplace
War has always reshaped work, often in ways we only notice years later. During World War II, factories extended their shifts, rerouted supply chains, and subjected workers to harsher conditions. The oil crisis of the 1970s forced entire industries to rethink energy use and production schedules. Conflict has always carried consequences beyond the battlefield, but today, those consequences travel faster and further than ever before.
Modern wars ripple through global energy systems, markets, and supply chains, ultimately altering conditions inside workplaces thousands of miles away. Developed countries often mitigate the impact. They engage subsidies, strategic reserves, and robust infrastructure to combat these challenges so that when energy costs rise or power is constrained, operations continue without catastrophic disruption. But in developing and underdeveloped countries, the story is far harsher. Fragile energy grids, reliance on generators, and limited cooling systems leave workers exposed when global events trigger energy shocks.
Recent history offers sobering examples. In Pakistan and Bangladesh, energy shortages during recent global fuel crises forced factories and businesses to reduce operations, leaving workers in sweltering conditions and slowing production. Even when work persisted, heat exposure and fatigue silently escalated, often eluding capture in safety reports.
Today, the emerging conflict between the joint US-Israeli forces and Iran is already demonstrating this pattern. Disruptions to shipping routes like the Strait of Hormuz, responsible for roughly 20% of global oil flows, have driven oil prices above $100 per barrel and sent fuel costs soaring. Brent crude surged above $120 per barrel. Qatar declared force majeure on LNG contracts after drone strikes damaged the Ras Laffan complex, removing 19% of global LNG trade from the market. The International Energy Agency called it the greatest global energy security challenge in history.
For developing countries, this situation is not an abstract economic story. It means higher fuel costs, reduced generator use, and more frequent power outages, conditions that directly affect workplaces. Factories, construction sites, and farms become hotter, more dangerous, and harder to manage. Workers are forced to adapt to heat stress, fatigue, and increased risk of accidents. Yet EHS systems often fail to recognize the connection, treating war, energy, and heat as separate issues rather than a single, escalating hazard. We are managing safety inside systems that are being destabilized from the outside, and unless we change how we see these risks, workers will continue to bear the brunt of crises they did not create.
When energy fails, heat takes over
Energy and heat are more connected than most safety systems acknowledge. When power is stable, workplaces can control temperature through ventilation, cooling systems, and regulated environments. But when energy becomes unreliable or too expensive, that control disappears. Heat is no longer managed; it accumulates. Poor ventilation, high humidity, and indoor heat sources combine to push the body beyond its ability to regulate temperature, leading to heat stress and, in severe cases, organ failure or death.
We have already seen how deadly the situation can be. During extreme heat events in Canada, hundreds of deaths were recorded in a single season, with heat exposure either the direct cause or a major contributing factor. Between 1981 and 2022, there were 916 recorded heat-related deaths, with the majority occurring in just the last few years, evidence of a rapidly escalating risk.
For organizations, the impact is both human and operational. Heat reduces concentration and slows reaction time, increasing errors and incidents. It also cuts productivity. Studies show that for every temperature rise, worker output declines while fatigue and absenteeism increase.
So when energy fails, heat doesn’t just make work uncomfortable. It quietly erodes performance, increases risk, and exposes organizations to a level of danger that is often unmeasured until something goes wrong.
The war is exposing a blind spot in how we define risk
The conflict doesn't arrive on site as a headline. It arrives as a constraint. Then another. Then another. War is history's most efficient revealer of what systems cannot see, and the US-Israel-Iran conflict is exposing something the EHS profession has never fully confronted. We are managing risk inside a boundary that no longer contains it.
We often assume we understand risk because we can measure it. Incident rates, lost-time injuries, compliance scores, and clean dashboards — these suggest control. But they only measure what the system was designed to see. And our systems were designed to look inward. They track incidents after they occur. They rarely track the slow erosion of conditions that makes those incidents inevitable.
That erosion is happening now. Quietly. Across five pathways.
Energy Compression. When fuel costs spike, organizations cut HVAC cycling, stretch maintenance windows, and reduce cooling loads. Finance makes these decisions — not EHS. But every degree above design temperature pushes workers closer to the physiological thresholds that govern cognition, reaction time, and error rate. None of this triggers an incident report.
Materials Fracture. When critical materials become scarce, prices surge—as seen with tungsten and aluminum in 2026. Organizations adapt by sourcing alternatives to maintain operations. However, these substitutions are often treated as routine fixes, without reassessing risk. Processes remain unchanged, even though the materials and the risks they introduce have fundamentally shifted.
Maintenance Debt. J.P. Morgan projects global GDP growth will be reduced by 0.6% annualized through mid-2026. At the facility level, the impact shows up as deferred maintenance, delayed repairs, extended inspections, and less frequent servicing. These changes rarely trigger alerts, but over time, they quietly accumulate, increasing the risk of eventual system failure.
Psychological Load. Workers are watching fuel prices, grocery bills, and volatile markets, some running double shifts because their households now require it. None of these factors appear in a Job Hazard Analysis. But each stressor degrades the cognitive margin on which safe work depends. Attention narrows. Error rates rise in ways indistinguishable from normal variation until the incident makes them visible. By then, the investigation finds the proximate cause. It does not find the war.
The Phantom Contractor. When primary contractors face financial pressure, work moves down the supply chain to entities with less robust safety systems and less site-specific knowledge. Third- or fourth-tier subcontractors, whose competency the host organization never verified, send workers to the site. War doesn't cause these issues directly. It pressures the economic system that governs contractor behavior — one of the least monitored risk vectors in industrial safety.
Each pathway is manageable in isolation. Collectively, they constitute an unmeasured operating environment—one where the numbers stay clean, and the conditions don't. That is the blind spot. And the war just turned the light on.
