Climate change represents the most significant long-term threat to animal welfare globally, affecting billions of wild and farmed animals through habitat loss, extreme weather, disease range expansion, and food system disruption.
Climate change is the background condition against which all other animal welfare work occurs - and it is getting worse faster than most welfare interventions can compensate. Wild animal populations are losing habitat, experiencing physiological stress from temperature extremes, and facing new disease pressures. Farmed animals face increasing heat stress that current welfare standards were not designed to manage. Marine animals face ocean acidification and warming that is systematically destroying the ecosystems they depend on. The welfare response to climate change requires working at two levels simultaneously: reducing emissions to slow the damage, and adapting welfare standards and management to protect animals from the impacts that are now inevitable. Animal welfare advocates who do not engage with climate policy are missing the biggest welfare emergency of our era.