Climate change is increasingly recognised as an animal welfare crisis, amplifying existing welfare problems and creating new ones across wild, farmed, and companion animal contexts.
Climate change is the largest and most complex welfare challenge facing animals in the 21st century. Its welfare impacts operate at every scale: individual animals dying in heat waves, populations losing habitat faster than they can adapt, species going extinct before welfare science has even characterised their needs. Climate change amplifies existing welfare problems -- drought worsens farm animal heat stress; flooding kills livestock that cannot be evacuated; wildfire destroys wildlife habitat that takes decades to recover. Addressing climate change is therefore also an animal welfare imperative, and animal welfare advocates have compelling reasons to engage with climate policy that goes beyond species conservation.