Persistent knowledge gaps and systemic barriers leave wildlife welfare underserved across the disaster management cycle.

Wildlife welfare in disasters is hindered by governance gaps, conflicting welfare frameworks, and absent validated assessment tools.

This review article identifies wildlife welfare during disasters as a critically underserved One Health issue, particularly as climate change increases the frequency and severity of ecological disasters such as wildfires, floods, heatwaves, and cyclones. Despite growing attention to animal emergency management (EM) across various jurisdictions, wildlife welfare remains inconsistently integrated into preparedness, response, and recovery frameworks. The authors identify three core systemic barriers: lack of coordinated governance among relevant agencies and stakeholders, tensions between individual animal welfare and population-level conservation priorities, and the absence of validated welfare assessment tools and humane endpoints for wildlife species. To address these gaps, the authors propose six key research priorities: developing frameworks to integrate wildlife expertise into EM systems, building collaborative networks bridging individual and population-level research, creating validated field welfare indicators and rapid assessment tools across taxa, establishing humane endpoints and decision thresholds for wildlife triage, standardizing postrelease survival and welfare monitoring, and evaluating the effectiveness of food and water provisioning strategies. This article serves as a foundational call to action for veterinary professionals, wildlife managers, and emergency responders to collaborate across disciplines. A companion article addresses practical integration of One Health approaches and veterinary professionals into EM systems to improve wildlife welfare outcomes during disasters.

This summary was distilled by AI and may occasionally misinterpret data. Confirm critical details with the primary literature before clinical application.