Climate change is one of the most significant emerging animal welfare threats. Understanding the connections between emissions reduction and animal welfare improves the case for climate action.
The connection between climate change and animal welfare is direct, numerous, and growing. Every degree of warming increases the frequency and severity of events that cause suffering at individual and population scale: wildfires that burn alive billions of animals, heat waves that kill livestock unable to thermoregulate, droughts that starve ungulate populations, and ocean warming that suffocates fish. Climate change is thus simultaneously the largest and most rapidly growing source of animal welfare harm in the world. Framing climate action as animal welfare advocacy connects the two movements in ways that can mobilize more diverse coalitions and deepen moral engagement with emissions reduction. Animal welfare advocates who do not engage with climate are failing to address the emerging dominant welfare crisis.