Penguins are among the most beloved seabirds, but climate change, overfishing, and pollution are causing mass chick mortality and adult starvation. The welfare impacts of these threats affect millions of individual birds.
Penguins face welfare harms that are difficult to address at the individual level but are driven by systemic human causes. Chick starvation during food shortage years causes slow, distressing deaths. Adult birds forced to swim ever greater distances for fish return exhausted, sometimes dying at sea. Oil-covered penguins lose thermoregulation and waterproofing, requiring intensive rehabilitation. The global nature of climate change means that penguin welfare improvement requires addressing the root cause — fossil fuel emissions — alongside local interventions like fishing restrictions around colonies and oil spill response capacity.