Climate change is driving cascading welfare impacts on marine mammals through prey distribution shifts, habitat loss, disease emergence, and increasingly frequent extreme weather events affecting breeding and foraging.
Marine mammals experience climate change not as an abstract statistic but as a daily reality of declining food availability, altered habitat, novel disease, and increasingly unpredictable environmental conditions. A polar bear spending weeks without food as sea ice fails to form experiences genuine suffering — hunger, physiological stress, and weakening that compromises every subsequent interaction. Whale calves born to mothers in poor nutritional condition enter the world already disadvantaged. The cumulative welfare burden across marine mammal populations is enormous and worsening. These are species with complex emotional lives, strong social bonds, and high cognitive capacity — the welfare implications of systematic habitat degradation deserve to be understood in individual animal terms, not only population trend statistics.