Climate change is emerging as one of the most significant threats to both wild and farmed animal welfare — with impacts spanning heat stress, habitat loss, phenological mismatch, and extreme weather events.
Climate change represents the most significant emerging threat to animal welfare across all categories — wild, farmed, and companion. The mechanisms are diverse: direct heat stress causing mortality and productivity loss in farmed animals; habitat loss and fragmentation forcing wildlife into sub-optimal environments; phenological mismatches creating nutritional crises for migratory species; disease vector range expansion exposing naive animal populations to new pathogens; and extreme weather events causing mass wildlife displacement. The welfare implications are immediate and ongoing — each heat wave that kills millions of poultry, each coral bleaching event that starves reef fish, and each drought that drives wildlife from traditional ranges represents present welfare suffering, not hypothetical future risk. Addressing climate change is therefore one of the most consequential animal welfare interventions available — and one that requires systemic action beyond any individual consumer choice.