Climate change is increasing heat stress, changing disease patterns and altering feed availability for farm animals. Welfare-focused climate adaptation incorporates both mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Climate change is already affecting farm animal welfare and will increasingly do so under all emissions scenarios. Heat stress causes reduced feed intake, increased disease susceptibility, reproductive failure and death in extreme events. The welfare response requires adaptation: providing shade, cooling systems, adjusted feeding regimes and climate-resilient breeds. Mitigation (reducing livestock sector emissions through methane reduction, land use change) also has welfare implications - the production models that emit least tend to allow higher welfare per animal. Climate and welfare goals are largely aligned: lower-density, higher-welfare production is both less climatically impactful and better for individual animal wellbeing.