Marine heatwaves cause mass mortality events in marine wildlife; climate mitigation and local conservation actions protect animal welfare.
Marine heatwaves impose acute welfare costs on individual animals through thermal stress, starvation from prey disruption, and secondary disease. Mass mortality events represent massive welfare catastrophes affecting thousands of animals simultaneously. While rescue and rehabilitation provide welfare relief at the individual level, the primary intervention must be climate change mitigation to prevent the heatwave intensification driving these events.