Feeding the Future: Agroecological Pathways to Climate Adaptation and Food Security

Dairy production sits at the intersection of two agendas that have developed largely in parallel: the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from ruminant systems, and the improvement of animal welfare. Both agendas invoke the language of sustainability, yet they rest on different units of analysis, different evidentiary traditions and different normative commitments, and their interaction has received far less critical attention than either topic alone. This review examines the state of knowledge on the relationship between dairy cow welfare and climate change, treating climate as both a driver of welfare harm through rising thermal load and a source of interventions whose welfare consequences are frequently assumed rather than measured. Evidence was drawn from peer-reviewed literature retrieved through open scholarly databases and indexes, supplemented by citation searching and authoritative institutional sources, and appraised for design adequacy, measurement validity, geographical representativeness and consistency. Four findings dominate. Thermal load impairs welfare through mechanisms that are well characterised physiologically but poorly standardised in terms of threshold definition, so that heat-stress prevalence estimates are not comparable across studies. Heat abatement improves measured welfare while displacing environmental burden into water, electricity and embodied emissions, a transfer rarely quantified within the same analytical boundary. Anti-methanogenic feed additives, low-methane breeding and productivity-led intensification are evaluated overwhelmingly against production and emissions endpoints, with welfare treated as an absence of detected harm rather than as a measured outcome. Health, longevity and reduced involuntary culling represent the most defensible convergence between the two agendas, although the magnitude of the emissions benefit is sensitive to system boundaries and herd structure assumptions. The evidence supports neither a general synergy claim nor a general trade-off claim. Progress requires joint measurement within shared analytical boundaries, welfare-explicit reporting in mitigation trials, and governance instruments that prevent welfare from becoming invisible within carbon accounting.