A fifth of the world’s oil passes through a strait just 55km wide. Right now, that strait is closed, and it’s not the only one. For most of us, the Strait of Hormuz, the Panama Canal and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait are names we half-remembered from a geography lesson. But right now, all three of these critical shipping lanes, plus the Suez Canal and the South China Sea straits, are under simultaneous strain. And the causes aren’t separate stories. War, the climate crisis and a strong El Niño are compounding each other, squeezing the narrow waterways that carry the fuel, food and goods the world runs on. That’s the warning at the heart of a report from the climate think tank E3G, Beyond Securing Supply. It makes a case that should worry anyone who cares about a just, liveable future: the world’s energy system isn’t just fragile because of any one crisis. It’s fragile because a small number of choke points now have to absorb war, sabotage, congestion and climate breakdown, often at the same time and there’s no cushion left when several hit at once. Three narrow waterways, one overstretched system The Strait of Hormuz. Just 55km wide at its narrowest point, this single passage between Iran and Oman normally carries roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil and a fifth of its LNG. Since the outbreak of the 2026 war between Iran, the US and Israel, the strait has been effectively shut to commercial shipping. Attacks on tankers pushed war-risk insurance premiums up as much as fourfold, and freight rates on the key Gulf-to-Asia route jumped over 300% almost overnight. Oil and gas prices spiked globally within days, even hitting countries with no direct trade link to the region at all. The Gulf of Oman connects the Arabian Sea with the Strait of Hormuz. Photo: picture alliance/dpa/NASA/The Visible Earth Bab el-Mandeb, at the mouth of the Red Sea, is a vital 18-mile-wide sea lane, a primary global chokepoint where roughly 10% to 12% of international trade and millions of barrels of oil pass dailyOngoing Houthi attacks since late 2023 have made it too dangerous, pushing most Western-linked shipping to go all the way around Africa, via the Cape of Good Hope. That’s not a return to normal , it’s a new, permanently more expensive normal: longer voyages, higher freight and insurance costs, and less spare tanker capacity to absorb the next shock. Egypt runs the Suez Canal revenues and depends on its tolls, a critical piece of its economy, that have now reportedly fallen by roughly half. The Bab al-Mandeb Strait from space, between the Horn of Africa (left) and the Arabian Peninsula (right). Photo: by Gallo Images, Orbital Horizon/Copernicus Sentinel Data 2021/Getty Images The Panama Canal. This is a channel where 5-6% of all global trade goes through, including critical food and gas supplies. Unlike the other two, this chokepoint isn’t shut by conflict , it’s impacted by drought. A strong El Niño, layered on top of long-term climate change, has driven Gatún Lake (the freshwater reservoir the canal’s locks depend on) to record lows for a second time in three years. Daily transits have been cut from the normal ~36–38 ships down toward the low 20s. Ships without a booked slot now face costly reservation auctions , where the average winning bid has reportedly jumped from around $135,000 to as much as $4 million. Scientists studying the 2023 Panama drought concluded it would have been ‘unlikely’ without El Niño, and that climate change is making these swings between El Niño and La Niña more extreme and more frequent. The Panama Canal is located directly between the Atlantic Ocean (via the Caribbean Sea) and the Pacific Ocean Photo: GeogGlobeTales, TikTok Why these aren’t separate problems It would be easy to file all this under ‘geopolitics’ and move on but climate change isn’t a bystander here it’s a structural multiplier of chokepoint risk. Three things are happening at once: Physical disruption: War, attacks and accidents slow-down or block the routes directly.. ‘Paper chokepoints’: , Insurance companies, sanctions and shipping contracts make it hard to reroute, even when another path technically exists. Climate change: drought, heat and extreme weather are steadily eroding the capacity and reliability of the routes that would normally offer a way around a crisis. Crucially, these layers stack. When Hormuz closed ships couldn’t simply detour through the Red Sea route as an escape valve from the Hormuz crisis , because that route was already too dangerous.. When shipping gets rerouted around Africa to avoid the Red Sea, that adds pressure on tanker capacity everywhere else. And when the Panama Canal , one of the few large alternative corridors for Asia-bound US cargoes , is running at reduced capacity because of drought, there’s less slack left in the whole system to absorb the next shock, wherever it comes from. In other words: the more the climate crisis narrows our margin for error, the harder every other kind of shock , war, sabotage, an accident, a blockage , hits. Who pays the price The costs of this don’t land evenly, and that’s the injustice at the centre of it. While governments of oil-exporting countries may actually see revenues rise when prices spike; Ordinary households, especially in import-dependent countries, see the opposite: higher fuel and shipping costs pushed straight through to food and energy bills. A 10% rise in fuel prices is estimated to raise food distribution costs by 3–5% in import-dependent economies , a burden that falls hardest on the poorest households, where food can already absorb 50–70% of income. South Asian economies like Pakistan and Bangladesh are the most structurally exposed of all major importers, heavily dependent on Gulf LNG routed through Hormuz, with little spare capacity to cushion a shock. There’s also a slower-moving hit still coming: the Gulf supplies close to half the world’s sulphur and urea (both critical fertiliser inputs) and roughly 40% of global helium. E3G’s analysis (echoed elsewhere) suggests fertilizer shortages triggered by the Hormuz disruption could take 6–9 months to show up, meaning the full effect on food prices and harvests across South Asia and East Africa may still be ahead of us. More fossil fuels won’t fix this The instinctive response to a supply shock is to look for more fossil fuel supply, from new suppliers, new pipelines, new terminals but more supply does not remove the exposure. Oil is priced on integrated global markets, so a shock anywhere raises prices everywhere, regardless of where your own cargo comes from. Diversifying suppliers can smooth short-term bumps, but it doesn’t touch the structural vulnerability of depending on a small number of narrow physical corridors in the first place. The one thing that does reduce exposure, durably, is needing less oil and gas to move through these chokepoints at all. Once a wind turbine or solar panel is installed, it generates power locally for 25–30 years, immune to a closed strait or a dried-up lake, in a way that no amount of LNG diversification can match. Electrification, efficiency, grid build-out and clean power aren’t just climate policies anymore , they’re energy security policy, and arguably the only kind that actually holds up under simultaneous shocks. That’s the throughline connecting Hormuz, Bab el-Mandeb and Panama: three very different crises, one shared root cause , a global energy system built on continuous shipments through a handful of chokepoints, now colliding with a warming, more volatile world. The war in the Gulf will end at some point. The next El Niño will not be the last, and it won’t be gentler. Building resilience means shrinking our dependence on the fossil fuel system that keeps putting all of us at the mercy of these narrow stretches of water. Sources: E3G, Beyond Securing Supply: Chokepoint Risk for Oil and Gas Importers, March 2026. Additional information from World Weather Attribution, Carbon Brief, and reports on the August 2026 Panama Canal restrictions. 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