This paper re-examines the Iraqi-Kuwaiti crisis of 1961, triggered by Iraqi leader ‘Abd al-Karim Qasim’s claim to Kuwait as part of Iraqi territory, and the events that immediately preceded and followed it. I aim to understand how the clashing concepts of Iraqi and Kuwaiti sovereignty were produced through public historical disputes and, crucially, ideas about environmental changes and resource scarcity caused by imperial intervention and the development of the oil industry. I explore this topic through Iraqi, Kuwaiti, and international media; engineering documents; and British archives. There are numerous extant histories of the 1961 crisis that examine it from the perspective of British foreign and military policy, and these accounts also thoroughly discuss Iraq’s and Kuwait’s respective claims to Kuwait’s rightful status that sparred over conflicting understandings of the Ottoman-era history of the region. Through new research, I am building on our understanding of these events by focusing on how environmental claims were also key to Iraqi and Kuwaiti understandings of their own sovereignties, and how these ideas intertwined with disputes over history. In their initial claims that Kuwait was part of Iraq, Iraqi government sources (including Qasim himself) asserted that Britain had intentionally drawn Kuwait’s borders to leave it barren of fresh water supplies so that it could be exploited for oil. Qasim, for example, framed the “liberation” of Kuwait as an act of care, extending water supplies to a vulnerable population to ensure their survival while their oil would inevitably run out. At the same time, the Kuwaiti press proudly reported that Kuwait was beginning to extract fresh water from its own underground aquifers, ensuring that it would no longer need to import water from Iraq. In the early 1960s, the concept of resource sovereignty was central to anticolonial politics, and pan-Arabism was at the peak of its influence. As a result, the competing Iraqi and Kuwaiti claims were made within pan-Arabist frameworks, though with differing and incompatible concepts of what that meant. Ultimately, I argue that the 1961 crisis is a key moment for understanding how Iraqi and Kuwaiti anticolonial politics had dramatically shifted since the 1930s, as well as for tracing the roots of how competing Iraqi and Kuwaiti sovereignties became entangled with Western imperial politics in contradictory ways thirty years later. This moment was produced in the nexus of oil, water, and—although the concept did not yet exist locally—a warming climate.