Climate change creates new and intensified welfare challenges across farmed, wild, and companion animals whose needs are affected by rising temperatures, extreme weather, habitat loss, and food system disruption.
Climate change is the defining welfare challenge of the coming decades for animals across all contexts. The welfare impacts are not future risks but current realities: heat stress events killing millions of farmed animals, thermal displacement of coral reef fish, altered wildlife behavioral ecology from phenological mismatch, and increasing disaster welfare emergencies. Climate adaptation in livestock systems — heat-tolerant genetics, cooling infrastructure, altered management timing — has direct welfare co-benefits alongside production resilience. Wild animal climate adaptation requires habitat corridor maintenance that allows range shifts, thermal refugia protection, and reduction of additional stressors that impair climate resilience. Climate mitigation remains the most fundamental welfare action available, making individual and policy-level climate action directly relevant to animal welfare.