Climate change is the defining wildlife welfare challenge of the 21st century, affecting billions of wild animals through heat stress, habitat loss, food insecurity, and disease. The welfare stakes are enormous.
Climate welfare represents the largest scale animal welfare challenge ever confronted. The suffering caused by climate change to individual wild animals — dying of heat stress, starvation from prey loss, disease from immune-suppressing environmental stress — is occurring across billions of individuals worldwide. The welfare argument for urgent climate action parallels and amplifies the ecological and human welfare arguments. Mass mortality events including flying fox die-offs from heat waves, fish kills from warming rivers, and seabird colony failures from prey collapse are welfare catastrophes measured in millions of individual animals. Climate welfare is not abstract — it is happening now, and its scale will grow with every additional degree of warming that political and collective action fails to prevent.