Climate change is forcing farm animal welfare science to engage with thermal adaptation, feed availability, and disease range shifts — creating new challenges for producers and policymakers.
Climate change is creating new welfare challenges for farm animals through heat stress, feed insecurity, disease emergence, and extreme weather events. These challenges interact with existing welfare vulnerabilities in intensive systems — overcrowded, poorly ventilated facilities become life-threatening in heat waves. Producers in warming regions are increasingly making breed selection decisions with heat tolerance as a welfare criterion. Disease range expansion brings new pathogens to naive livestock populations. Extreme weather creates acute welfare emergencies at scale. Climate adaptation in livestock systems is thus inseparable from welfare management.