WFA Climate Tool: Leveraging Animal Welfare for Climate Action
As countries update their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), integrating animal welfare is critical. Wild animals are vital to ecosystem health, supporting processes like pollination and carbon storage that help mitigate climate change. Protecting wildlife is therefore not just a biodiversity goal– it is a climate imperative.
The Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement calls for approaches that address climate change and biodiversity loss together, in line with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework. Animal protection plays a crucial role in these efforts, maintaining ecosystem health, integrity, and functionality.
Achieving net-zero emissions requires not only reducing greenhouse gases but also enhancing carbon sequestration. Wild animals contribute significantly by maintaining ecosystems like forests and oceans, which absorb and store carbon. However, this potential is undermined by industrial animal agriculture, which drives habitat loss, biodiversity decline, and climate disruption.
This inventory provides policymakers with actionable measures to tackle these interconnected challenges. By focusing on biodiversity protection and restoration, shifting consumption patterns, and transforming production practices, it offers a comprehensive toolkit for building integrated NDCs that safeguard both climate and nature–with animal welfare at the core.
