Introduction
The impact of climate change on humans does not begin with flooded hospitals or heat-stricken human bodies. It begins in the silent suffering of animals. Drought kills cattle before malnutrition appears in children. Heatwaves suffocate poultry flocks before emergency wards overflow. Shifting rains strip grazing lands before supermarket prices spike. Wildlife displaced by habitat collapse comes into contact with humans long before the next pandemic is declared.

Climate change is not only a human health crisis. It is first and unapologetically a veterinary crisis. And yet, the dominant language of global health pretends otherwise. Billions are invested in strengthening hospitals, stockpiling vaccines, and training medical staff for climate adaptation. These are necessary interventions, but they are built on sand if the livestock, wildlife, and animal-dependent ecosystems that sustain human survival are ignored. Veterinary systems are treated as auxiliary, “technical” sectors when in reality, they are foundational climate infrastructure. Their chronic neglect is not a minor gap; it is a structural blind spot threatening both planetary health and human futures.

Animals as Early Warning Systems
Animals are frontline sentinels of climate breakdown. Rising temperatures show themselves first in reduced milk yields, lower fertility in dairy cows, or sudden poultry die-offs. Drought reveals itself in emaciated herds before famine statistics make headlines. Epidemics like Rift Valley fever, anthrax, and avian influenza surge in animals before humans fall ill. To monitor animal health is to monitor climate’s immediate impact on life itself.

Yet veterinary services remain underfunded, understaffed, and politically marginalized across much of the world, especially in the Global South where dependence on animals for food, culture, and livelihoods is greatest. If climate adaptation truly aimed to save lives, then veterinary surveillance systems, animal health extension workers, and climate-smart livestock technologies would receive the same political attention as hospitals. But instead, we watch crises unfold in animals until they explode in humans.

The Cost of Neglect
Consider Africa’s Sahel region, where pastoralist communities are pushed to the edge by prolonged droughts. When herds collapse, the result is not just animal death — it is household destitution, malnutrition, migration, and conflict. These are the very crises global health claims to address, yet their veterinary roots are ignored.

Similarly, in Asia, poultry losses from heat stress are projected to run into billions of dollars, undermining protein security for hundreds of millions of people. Still, veterinary adaptation receives a fraction of the funding allocated to human-focused climate interventions.

This imbalance reflects a stubborn anthropocentrism in global health: animals matter only when they become a direct threat to humans, whether through food shortages or zoonotic spillovers. Their intrinsic value, their role in livelihoods, and their capacity as climate indicators remain invisible. This myopia is costly, both morally and materially.

Reframing Veterinary Systems as Climate Infrastructure
To survive climate change, global health must be restructured around the reality that animal health is human health. Every cow shielded from drought through early-warning systems, every goat vaccinated against preventable disease, every chicken flock protected through climate-smart housing is not just an act of animal welfare, it is an act of human survival and resilience.

We must stop treating veterinary services as technical appendages and instead recognize them as essential climate infrastructure. This means:

1. Embedding veterinary services into national climate adaptation plans.
2. Funding digital and AI-enabled livestock monitoring systems as seriously as human disease surveillance.
3. Training a new generation of veterinarians as frontline climate responders.
4. Supporting pastoralist and indigenous knowledge systems that have protected animals — and therefore humans — through centuries of ecological upheaval.

From Afterthought to First Thought
If global health continues to see climate change only through a human medical lens, it will fail. Hospitals will overflow, food systems will collapse, pandemics will multiply and policymakers will wonder why. The answer will be simple: because the crisis began in animals, and we chose not to see it.

The unapologetic truth is this: global health must reframe climate change as a veterinary crisis before it is a medical one. Only then can we build the resilient, integrated systems needed to withstand what is already upon us. Until veterinary health is treated as central to climate survival, global health will remain unprepared, unjust, and dangerously incomplete.

This is not charity for animals. It is a survival strategy for humanity.

Bobwealth Omontese, DVM, MS, PhD, FCVSN, MPA, MBA

College of Veterinary Medicine, Tuskegee University, Tuskegee, Alabama-USA