Climate change is an emerging welfare crisis for animals, intensifying heat stress, disease, habitat loss, and natural disaster exposure.
Climate change is simultaneously a welfare crisis for billions of animals and a force multiplier for existing welfare problems. Farm animals experience more heat stress days per year, increasing suffering and requiring more intensive cooling interventions. Wild animals face habitat shifts faster than evolutionary adaptation can accommodate, leading to starvation, disease, and reproductive failure. The welfare impacts of climate change are often invisible in aggregate statistics but represent individual experiences of heat, hunger, fear, and death. The most effective intervention for animal welfare is climate action — reducing greenhouse gas emissions, protecting carbon sinks including old-growth forests, and building climate resilience into agriculture and conservation policy.