Climate change is altering the distribution and abundance of penguin prey species, creating foraging challenges that directly affect the welfare and survival of wild penguin populations.
The welfare of individual penguins during foraging is directly affected by climate-driven prey redistributions that force birds to travel farther and spend longer at sea under energetically costly conditions. Chicks waiting for parents on long foraging trips experience hunger and temperature stress that create acute welfare suffering. These stressors are not natural background mortality but human-caused welfare harms that accumulate across millions of individual animals annually. Conservation actions that address both direct threats like fisheries competition and systemic causes like carbon emissions have both conservation and welfare justifications.