It would be hard to find a human on Earth unaffected by the US-Israel war against Iran. Several thousand have been killed. Millions more pay each day in steeper food prices or at the petrol pump, and as inflation eats away at the value of their earnings.
For many, the final bill has not yet come, but it will eventually. They will pay for the long-term damage caused by the biggest threat of all to the global economy: uncertainty.
Uncertainty is hard to measure, but one way is to look at geopolitical risk, which stalls investment and employment. The US Federal Reserve economists Dario Caldara and Matteo Iacoviello have created an index that tracks reports of global tension. It shows the Iran war has been more destabilising than the Covid-19 pandemic, but on a par with either the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 or that of Iraq in 2003.
So how does the world tally the cost of this war? Some costs are easier to calculate than others, such as bills for surface-to-air missiles that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each. Others are harder to quantify, including the damage caused to Iranian and Lebanese hospitals and power networks. Much cannot be valued at all – the lives lost, including the 120 primary schoolchildren in Iran killed on the first day of the war.
Then there are hypothetical costs. A senior UN aid official framed the conflict in terms of opportunity cost, noting that the $2bn (£1.5bn) a day spent on military operations could otherwise cover lifesaving aid for roughly 87 million people.
And what about the beneficiaries of this war, the oil companies and the shareholders of arms manufacturers?
Here are some ways the impact of the war has been assessed:
Lives lost
The vast majority of the killings have targeted Iranian and Lebanese people.
In Iran, US and Israel bombings have killed more than 3,300 people and injured more than ten times that number, according to Iranian authorities. Twenty schools have been destroyed, and 240 health and medical facilities have been damaged. Water pipes have been blown up and cultural sites damaged, including five world heritage sites and 54 museums.
Israel opened a second front of the war when it invaded its northern neighbour, Lebanon, where it is fighting against the Iran-allied militant group Hezbollah. That war within a war has now become the most deadly part of the broader conflict – Israeli attacks have killed more than 3,700 people, according to Lebanese authorities, including women, children and medics.