One Planet. One Fight. One Future: Why Animal Protection Is Climate Action

Let’s be real: if you care about climate change but ignore the plight of animals, you’re missing the biggest piece of the puzzle. Because here’s the truth most people don’t want to admit—you can’t save the planet while harming animals.

Whether it's the food on your plate or the way we treat wildlife, every choice we make affects more than just ourselves. This fight—for animals and or the planet—is one and the same. And the clock is ticking.

Factory Farming Is Wrecking the Planet

Every year, more than 80 billion land animals are raised—and slaughtered—in cruel, cramped conditions. Most are kept in factory farms, where their lives are nothing but suffering from birth to death, but it doesn’t stop there.

• Animal agriculture is responsible for at least 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions—more than every plane, train, and car combined.
• Forests are clear-cut and grasslands are razed to grow crops for farmed animals—not feeding people—destroying vital ecosystems and releasing massive amounts of carbon.
• Methane from cows and nitrous oxide from manure are supercharged greenhouse gases, accelerating global warming faster than CO₂.
• Waste from factory farms leaches into waterways, pollutes communities, and contributes to ocean dead zones—areas where nothing can live.

If we’re serious about climate solutions, we can’t ignore the emissions coming from our plates.

Climate Disasters Are Killing Animals by the Millions

Animals are the first to feel the effects of climate breakdown and the ones most likely to be forgotten when disaster strikes.

In the last few years alone:

• More than 3 billion animals—yes, billion—were killed or displaced in the Australian bushfires of 2019–2020.
• In Hurricane Florence (2018), more than 3.4 million chickens and 5,500 pigs drowned in North Carolina, locked inside barns with no escape.
• In Canada’s 2021 heat dome, more than 651,000 farmed animals died in just one week from heatstroke and poor ventilation.
• During flooding in Italy in 2023, tens of thousands of farmed animals died—not from the storm, but from abandonment.

These animals didn’t die by accident. They died because our systems treat them like inventory, not living, sentient beings. And wild animals are enduring these horrors daily.

Rising temperatures are melting polar bear habitats, drying out wetlands, and turning forests into tinderboxes. Entire ecosystems are collapsing under the pressure of human-caused climate chaos.

We’re not just watching species disappear. We’re accelerating their extinction with every degree the planet heats.

Eating Farmed Animals Is Driving Wildlife to Extinction

Still think your dinner only impacts chickens, cows, or pigs? Think again.

Eating meat doesn’t just kill the animal on your plate. It’s killing wild animals, too.

Here’s how:

• Habitat destruction: Forests are destroyed to make room for grazing land or crops for animal feed. That pushes species out of their homes, often to their deaths. Jaguars, orangutans, elephants—all are losing ground to the meat industry.
• Climate change: As emissions rise, ecosystems collapse. Coral reefs bleach. Ice caps vanish. Grasslands dry up. Wild animals are left with nowhere to go, nothing to eat, and no time to adapt.
• Pollution: Factory farms contaminate waterways, affecting fish, amphibians, and countless species downstream.

This isn’t just sad. It's a mass extinction event in real time, and animal agriculture is pouring gasoline on the fire. So who’s really dying for your burger?

What You Can Do

This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about taking responsibility. The solution is in your hands—literally, at every meal.

• Eat more plant-based foods: Every bite that doesn’t come from industrial animal agriculture is a vote against climate destruction.
• Speak up for animals: From wild bears to baby chicks, they all deserve protection.
• Support climate action that includes animals: Because any solution that leaves them behind is no solution at all.
• Share this: If someone still thinks their steak is “sustainable,” send them this blog.

The animals are dying, the planet is burning, and the future is slipping away, one bite at a time.

One planet. One fight. One future. Support World Animal Protection’s fight for animals and the planet we all call home by donating today.