Extreme weather events intensified by climate change are increasingly affecting wild animal welfare through heat stress, flooding, drought and disrupted migration patterns with cascading welfare consequences.
Climate change is a wildlife welfare catastrophe unfolding at a pace that ecological systems cannot adapt to rapidly enough. Extreme heat waves kill individual animals directly through hyperthermia. Floods kill the young and vulnerable of ground-nesting and burrowing species. Drought creates chronic food insecurity and physiological stress across diverse wildlife communities. The welfare dimension of climate change — the suffering of individual animals during extreme events — is rarely foregrounded in climate communications that focus on species extinction and ecosystem collapse. Both frames are valid and complementary. Acting on climate change is simultaneously the most important conservation and wildlife welfare intervention available at civilisation scale.