Climate change and animal welfare are intersecting crises that require integrated responses — climate affects animals directly and through habitat, while animal agriculture contributes significantly to climate change.
Climate change is fundamentally an animal welfare crisis as well as an environmental and human crisis. The suffering it causes — through habitat loss, starvation, disease, heat stress, and ecological disruption — affects billions of individual animals across all taxa. And animal agriculture, as a major driver of climate change, creates a feedback loop in which farming practices cause both direct welfare harm to farmed animals and indirect harm to wild animals through the climate impacts of emissions. Addressing climate change is not separate from animal welfare advocacy but integral to it.