Urban environments support more wildlife than commonly recognised, and simple changes to how we design and manage urban spaces can dramatically improve welfare outcomes for birds, mammals, insects, and reptiles living alongside humans in towns and cities.
Urban wildlife welfare is an area where individual action aggregates into significant population-level benefit. Each garden that provides pollinator habitat, hedgehog access, bird nesting sites, and pesticide-free foraging contributes to a city-wide habitat network that supports millions of individual animals. The welfare case for urban wildlife support is both direct — individual animals have better nutrition, shelter, and reproductive success — and indirect, as urban wildlife populations increasingly represent the last refuge for many species squeezed out of intensively managed agricultural landscapes. Urban design choices — green infrastructure, wildlife crossings beneath roads, lighting management — can be advocated for at the planning and policy level, while individual garden management changes are immediately actionable. Together these approaches create cities that are genuinely habitable for the non-human animals that share them with us.