Climate Change Adaptation, Biodiversity Conservation, and the Place of Wild Animals

Approximately one million species are threatened with extinction, many within decades (IBPES 2019). Humanity’s land use remains the main driver of biodiversity loss, but the role of climate change is growing more significant and urgent (UN 2025): Climate change is profoundly altering ecosystems, resulting in mass mortality of plants and animals and the first climate change–associated species extinctions; and with every fraction of a degree increase in global temperatures, the risk of extinction increases and accelerates (IPCC 2022). We cannot achieve our biodiversity goals without responding effectively to climate change.

Our climate change response portfolio contains at least two major types: first, mitigation involves reducing greenhouse gas emissions to minimize climate change–related hazards; second, adaptation involves altering behaviors, systems, and ways of life in response to actual or predicted climate change to reduce vulnerability and exposure. Philosophers have focused overwhelmingly on mitigation. However, adaptation is now unavoidable. Unfortunately, the mitigation focus leaves us unprepared for the ethical challenges of adapting to climate change. Here, I address an important yet underexplored issue in adaptation ethics. What is the right place of biodiversity conservation in adaptation planning and policy? How should our adaptation and conservation agendas relate, particularly regarding wild animals?

Climate change threatens harms to individual animal welfare, populations, species, and biodiversity (Ripple et al. 2025). These harms matter intrinsically and instrumentally. So, there is a prima facie case for protecting wild animals by assisting their adaption to climate change. But how should we do this, at what cost, and to what ends? What ethical tradeoffs arise? In §1, I argue for including wild animal conservation in our adaptation agenda, rehearsing arguments from the literature (McShane 2016; Palmer 2016, 2021; Pepper 2019; Sebo 2022). In §2, I characterize three categories of assisted adaptation: structural (e.g., artificial habitats); behavioral (e.g., managed migration); and physiological (e.g., genetic interventions). In §3, I explore tradeoffs in each category. I conclude by identifying a tension between our obligation to assist wild animals and our valuing them as wild. For assisted adaptation can be transformative in ways that diminish or eliminate wild animals’ status as wild.