Climate change is emerging as one of the most significant drivers of animal welfare harm globally, affecting wild species through habitat loss, extreme weather, and phenological mismatch, and farmed animals through heat stress and disease.
Climate change is the largest emerging threat to animal welfare at global scale. The welfare consequences extend across every habitat: polar ice loss threatens specialists, ocean warming bleaches reefs and shifts prey distributions, drought and wildfire threaten terrestrial wildlife, and heat waves cause acute suffering and mortality in farmed animals. Individual welfare harms from climate change are often gradual and diffuse — starvation from prey shifts, heat stress in livestock, reproductive failure from phenological mismatch — making them less visible than acute events but no less real. Climate action is animal welfare action: the most significant choice available to individuals for improving aggregate animal welfare is reducing their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.