Climate change is creating new and intensifying existing welfare challenges for farmed animals globally. Understanding these impacts guides more resilient and welfare-protective agricultural systems.
Climate change is creating a compounding welfare crisis for farmed animals. Heat stress events that were previously exceptional are becoming routine in many regions, pushing animals in intensive systems — which already produce significant metabolic heat — toward physiological thresholds that cause acute distress and death. Flooding events compromise housing integrity, contaminate water supplies, and in some cases cause drowning mortality. Changing disease distributions bring new welfare threats from pathogens not previously encountered in affected regions. The cruel irony is that animal agriculture itself contributes substantially to the climate change that is creating these welfare emergencies. Addressing farm animal welfare from a climate perspective requires both adaptation — improving systems' resilience to climate impacts — and mitigation — reducing agricultural emissions that worsen the problem.