Climate change is emerging as a major driver of animal welfare harm across wild, farmed, and companion animal populations. Understanding these interactions informs both adaptation strategies and advocacy priorities.
Climate change is not a future welfare threat but a present one, already affecting billions of animals through heat stress, altered food availability, extreme weather events, and disease range expansion. The welfare implications span all categories of animals - farmed livestock under increased heat stress, wild species losing habitat and prey, companion animals facing more extreme weather events, and marine animals in warming, acidifying oceans. Animal welfare advocacy must increasingly engage with climate policy as a core welfare issue, recognizing that reducing emissions and building climate resilience are among the highest-impact welfare interventions of our time.