Although climate change is accelerating due to human activities, its impacts clearly extend to other species. Not only do animals face the overarching risk of extinction, they also encounter a range of effects in their daily lives. And as humans rely on animals for food, companionship, medicine, research, clothing, and other uses, focusing on climate change’s animal welfare impacts could be an important means of drawing attention to the issue. Yet, as the authors of this study argue, current communication practices might not be taking advantage of this framing.

To explore this gap, the authors gathered and analyzed academic literature with the goal of determining how animal welfare framing impacts people’s perceptions of climate change. To be included in their review, articles had to:

• Be written in English;
• Be peer-reviewed;
• Focus on climate change/global warming;
• Focus on animal welfare;
• Discuss people’s perceptions of animals;
• Include the framework used for communication about climate change and/or animal welfare; and
• Evaluate the impact of animal welfare framing on an outcome related to climate change.

The authors placed no limits on publication dates as they were interested in searching all articles ever written about climate change.

Animal Welfare Framing Is Underused

From this scoping review, the authors realized that many scholars who use animal welfare framing to communicate about climate change tend to focus on meat consumption and the environmental and animal welfare impacts of meat production. So, from an initial 4,080 articles, they ended up identifying only two studies relevant to their goal.

Both these studies surveyed farmers about the impacts on their animals of extreme weather events caused by climate change.

• The first study found that cow and sheep farmers in Australia felt an increased responsibility for their animals’ welfare during adverse weather. They linked good welfare with productivity, and so did their best to relieve their animals’ stress.
• The second study found that goat farmers in Chile were significantly impacted by their animals’ suffering through a period of prolonged drought. Beyond just their economic losses, farmers who perceived their goats to have poor welfare due to the drought had higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress.

Why Animal Welfare Framing Is Relevant

For the authors, these two studies reinforce the idea that animal welfare and human well-being are connected. They recognize that framing messages in different ways can be more or less effective with different audiences. From a point of view that puts humans at the center, they argue that choosing animal welfare as a frame for messages about the effects of climate change has the potential to lead to impactful changes. Basically, caring about animals could influence people to care more about climate change once the link between them is made clear.

Takeaways

Having identified only two studies that clearly communicated animal welfare as a climate change issue, this review reveals a gap in current communication strategies and highlights the possible advantages of implementing animal welfare framing. Given that animal welfare has gained popularity at a global level, the authors suggest that explicitly connecting it to climate change is an underused tool. Ultimately, leveraging the human-animal bond could help steer actions to tackle climate change.