I recently took part in a Defra roundtable on animal welfare, climate resilience and food systems. It was a positive session, but it reinforced something I strongly believe – without good animal welfare practice, there is no climate resilience in farming.

Carbon footprints, feed conversion ratios, greenhouse gas emissions – these topics dominate sustainability debates, and rightly so. But when they become the only numbers that matter, we create a dangerous blind spot.

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Measuring these numbers alone risks rewarding highly intensive, lower-welfare systems that look efficient on paper, but are ecologically destructive in practice.

A low carbon-per-kg metric is a narrow lens that fails to account for negative side effects: it ignores the nitrogen run-off polluting our waterways, the loss of biodiversity as meadows are converted to monoculture feed crops, and the erosion of soil health.

By optimising for these narrow targets, we create systems more vulnerable to climate shocks.

Mass mortality during climate events, such as heatwaves – fast becoming a feature of British summers – is a stark example.

When thousands of birds die in a single shed, the carbon cost of rearing them is wasted, and the food produced is lost – not to mention the harm to the animals.

Food waste

The statistic that 40% of food is wasted tells us we do not need to produce more food through increasingly intensive systems – we simply need to waste less of what we already produce.

The research behind food waste also has a significant gap – it does not fully capture losses across the entire supply chain.

It is unlikely to account for the vast quantities of feed, water and land effectively wasted when animals die in mass mortality events during heatwaves and other climate shocks.

And even when waste is recorded at retail or consumer level, it is simply counted as a single product rather than reflecting the full volume of resources required to produce it.

In this context, the push for “efficiency” looks misplaced. We are optimising for efficiency within a system that does not fully account for what is being lost.

Investing in higher welfare, more resilient farming systems isn’t in tension with sustainability goals, but central to achieving them.

On-farm investment

None of this will shift without investment. Our 4,000-plus RSPCA Assured members are proof that farmers want to do the right thing.

What they lack is financial support from the government to make and maintain the transition to higher-welfare, more climate-resilient systems.

Better housing, slower-growing breeds, appropriate stocking densities, natural cover such as trees on any outside area provided, and better litter management – these all play a role in mitigating heat stress in animals, but they have real financial implications.

The government often leaves farmers to bear these costs alone, while voluntary schemes and welfare charities, like RSPCA Assured – which cannot afford to fund capital investment – are expected to fill the gap with goodwill.

The good news from the roundtable is that the appetite exists to interlink farmed animal welfare, climate resilience and food waste.

It just remains to be seen whether it will translate into policy. Welfare resilience is climate resilience, and we need to start investing in it.