Climate change is driving declines in seabird populations globally through multiple mechanisms including prey availability shifts, extreme weather events, and altered breeding success.
Climate-driven welfare impacts on seabirds are large-scale and largely invisible: individual seabirds experiencing starvation as prey shifts away from colony foraging ranges suffer acutely, but the scale and dispersion of the problem makes welfare assessment and intervention extremely difficult. Colony collapse events - where entire breeding seasons produce zero or near-zero chick survival - represent mass welfare failures affecting thousands of animals simultaneously. Seabirds that travel vast distances to find food and return to feed chicks that have died of starvation in their absence experience a form of prolonged futile effort. The long-lived nature of seabirds means individual animals may survive while failing to reproduce for years, experiencing the behavioral drives to breed without successful outcome. Conservation interventions including supplementary feeding at select colonies and predator control can provide welfare benefit at the individual colony scale, but cannot address the systemic ocean warming driving prey availability changes.