About the Consensus
Why was the Consensus developed?
The Scientific Consensus on Wildlife and Climate responds to a growing body of research showing that wild animals can influence ecological processes relevant to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience.
Across terrestrial, freshwater, coastal, and marine systems, studies show that animals can affect vegetation dynamics, nutrient cycling, carbon processes, disturbance patterns, ecosystem recovery, and resilience. These effects vary, and they are often context-dependent,but the broad conclusion is clear: wild animals are not simply passive inhabitants of ecosystems. In many cases, they help shape how ecosystems, and by extension, the climate functions.
Despite this, animal-mediated processes remain underrepresented in the frameworks, assessments, and models that inform climate policy. Climate discourse often focuses on vegetation, soils, land use, emissions sectors, and physical system change than on the ecological roles of wild animals within functioning ecosystems.
The Consensus brings the current state of knowledge together in a careful, accessible and policy-relevant form. It does not claim that animal effects are uniform or always operate in the same directions. It identifies where scientific agreement has emerged: that wild animals can play important roles in climate-relevant ecosystem functioning, and that these roles should no longer be treated as peripheral.
What does this mean for policy?
The Scientific Consensus statement is concise and science-led, but its policy implication is significant:
Where wild animals materially influence ecosystem processes relevant to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience, then those roles should be explicitly accounted for in climate policy and planning. This does not replace the need for rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It strengthens climate and biodiversity policy by accounting for the ecological processes that allow ecosystems to function, recover and remain resilient.
In practice, this means looking beyond habitat extent or carbon stocks alone, and considering animal-mediated ecosystem processes, as these processes are relevant to ecosystem assessments, climate modelling, restoration planning, nature-based and natural climate solutions, Nationally Determined Contributions, National Adaptation Plans and related biodiversity, land, freshwater, coastal and marine frameworks.
It also means recognising that wildlife decline can weaken ecosystem resilience, regenerative capacity and carbon or nutrient dynamics, whilst recovery may, in some contexts, strengthen climate-relevant ecosystem function. Better research, monitoring and indicators will be needed to understand where these effects are most relevant and how they can be responsibly reflected in policy.
At the national level, governments should begin to account more explicitly for wild animals and their functional roles in climate strategies and frameworks. This includes, where relevant, national adaptation planning, mitigation planning, ecosystem restoration strategies, and nature-based solutions. This does not mean assuming that all wildlife recovery automatically delivers climate benefits in every context. It means ensuring that policy is informed by the best available ecological understanding of how animal populations influence ecosystem function in particular places and systems.