The Animals Are Not Alright

As floods and heatwaves intensify, farm animals remain invisible in EU disaster planning & response

Last year, I had the opportunity to mentor two groups of journalists investigating important but often overlooked parts of European food systems.

One looked at how Europe’s farm subsidy scheme fails workers by failing to curb labour exploitation and abuse. It was published in September (see my write-up here) and later won an award at the Voices - European Festival of Journalism and Media Freedom.

The second story, on the near-complete lack of data and planning around the impact of weather-related disasters on farm animals, was published earlier this month on Voxeurop.

It exposes a glaring contradiction: policymakers at both EU and national levels claim to support livestock farmers, yet have done little to protect them from increasingly frequent climate-related disasters.

The lack of support for farmers practising high animal welfare and extensive agriculture (the opposite of intensive farming - fewer animals, more space, lower inputs) is particularly striking.

Please read and share the story. Please also keep a lookout for the national-level articles that will be published in the coming weeks.

Up in the mountains. Photo by me.

In last week’s preamble, I mentioned European policymakers’ fixation on livestock, and the political energy spent debating what names plant-based products can use.

After lawmakers agreed to “ban meaty names such as steak and bacon for vegetarian and vegan foods”, French MEP Céline Imart, who devised the amendment to ban meaty names, hailed the outcome as “an undeniable success for our livestock farmers”, The Guardian reported.

Perhaps I’m being facetious, but it raises an obvious question: what would a real success for livestock farmers look like?

One answer might be concrete plans to protect them and their animals from weather-related disasters that are increasing in frequency and ferocity on the world’s fastest-warming continent.

“As climate change-connected floods intensify across Europe, thousands of farm animals die unseen and uncounted. Farmers bear the losses alone while patchy data, weak planning and narrow compensation expose a blind spot in EU climate policy,” according to Drowned and forgotten: Farm animals are Europe’s silent flood victims.

This was a cross-border investigation looking at the impacts of and responses to floods in five EU member countries: Czechia, France, Germany, Poland and Romania by Leoni Bender, Louisa Bouri-Saouter, Maria Dybcio, Martin Vrba, Raluca Besliu, and Tom Brown, who came together over a shared aim of shining a light on this issue.

Raluca told me she was drawn to the story because farmers are often the first to face the consequences of climate change.

“One of the most significant impacts for farmers is the loss of livestock, which carries not only financial costs but also emotional and ethical ones, and can fundamentally change how they approach animal raising.”

The Losses

Between 1980 and 2023, climate-related disasters caused €738 billion in economic losses across the EU, the journalists wrote. More than 20% of this - €162 billion - occurred in the last three years, underscoring how rapidly risks are escalating.

Those of us who have lived in Europe over the past five years remember the repeated heatwaves, wildfires, floods, and storms.

Agriculture alone loses an average of €28 billion annually due to adverse weather, according to a 2025 European Investment Bank report:

• €17.4 billion in crops (about 6.4% of EU crop production)

• €10.9 billion in livestock (about 5.1% of EU livestock production)

Losses are expected to reach €40 billion by mid-century, yet only 20-30% of these losses are insured, with major disparities between member states, and in some cases no coverage at all.

This insurance gap - as well as the general lack of disaggregated data on livestock losses - has far-reaching repercussions for farmers, as the journalists found out.

There is no comprehensive EU-wide data on livestock losses, either historical or projected. Even the European Investment Bank’s analysis focuses primarily on crop production.

Yet we know the losses are substantial just from the value alone, at nearly €11 billion.

“Europe is home to 132 million pigs, 72 million cattle, 57 million sheep, and 10 million goats. As floods intensify, the continent lacks a systematic way to count, protect, or compensate for the animals that perish in them. Such losses are rarely recorded, often inaccessible, or buried in bureaucratic systems.”

“This structural blindness has tangible consequences: uncounted animals are undervalued, undercompensated, and unprotected, reducing incentives to prevent future losses,” the journalists wrote.

The Reality vs. The Rhetoric

Under the EU Treaty, animals are legally recognised as sentient beings whose welfare must be “fully regarded.” Yet in practice, livestock losses in disasters often fall through the cracks of both insurance systems and public compensation schemes.

Take French organic farmer Edouard Exilard, who lost 35 ewes after floodwaters swept through his meadow in October 2024. His losses came up to at least €12,000 but he received no compensation despite having insurance, because it only covered livestock found dead inside buildings, when organic farming rules require daily outdoor grazing.

In Romania, families affected by floods received two rounds of compensation: one covered housing damage and the other was legally earmarked for four goods: an oven, a television, a refrigerator, and a washing machine. Farmers like Maria received no compensation after losing more than €20,000 worth of livestock.

Germany says it reimburses livestock-related costs if farmers could prove “a direct link” to the flooding. For Sebastian Frey, however, it meant claims for his cows, who survived the evacuation but died of pneumonia days later, were mostly denied.

Some of the cases illustrate just how different the resilience of various farming systems can be, said Martin.

“For example, while small-scale family farms were relatively successful in mitigating the damage from floods and rescuing their animals, large-scale industrial farming easily leads to massive losses due to no realistic options to rescue such large numbers of animals in a short time span. Ironically, it’s these megafarms who afterwards benefit the most from the existing financial compensations, while small farmers’ financial needs were often neglected.”

Perhaps the most telling might be a response from an EU Commission spokesperson when pressed about the bloc’s lacking a system to track and compensate livestock losses from disasters.

“Animal welfare in disasters does not fall within the scope of EU animal welfare legislation.”

Data & Governance Blind Spots

The journalists discovered that governments systematically track human and infrastructure losses, but not livestock mortality. This creates a structural blind spot: animals that are not counted are less likely to be compensated or protected in future planning.

The Ministry of Agriculture in Germany’s North Rhine-Westphalia did not know how the 2021 catastrophic floods that damaged hundreds of farms affected livestock because it did not collect such data. France’s Direction Générale de l’Alimentation didn’t respond.

Romania is the rare exception, where private veterinarians play a critical role in keeping a count of all the animals in their assigned territory. This is why the authorities reported a detailed inventory following the September 2024 floods in Vaslui and Galați counties: 14,066 birds, 1,888 sheep, 564 pigs, and hundreds of other animals.

Louisa particularly remembered struggling with the lack of data. Often there were no answers or people just ghosted her.

“There are some datasets I could never confirm existed or not. Animals are dying, farmers say, and yet it’s so challenging to access official proof and to produce proper counts,” she said.

Leoni agreed the complete lack of systematic data in Germany was striking.

“Also alarming is the institutional fragmentation: authorities and ministries deflect responsibility, disaster preparedness plans largely exclude livestock and existing specialised animal rescue units are often disregarded or actively sidelined.”

In Germany, animal welfare is considered under the law even in emergencies, yet in reality, none of the 16 states require animals to be considered in disaster planning. Similar gaps exist in Poland and Czechia.

Romania, with a clear legal framework, seems to be an exception again, but interviews with affected farmers show most protocols were not followed in practice.

The Story Repeats Itself

Unfortunately, the challenges for the journalists didn’t stop with a lack of data or cooperation from officials. The story repeats itself when they wanted to get the investigation published.

“After months of failed attempts to find a media outlet willing to publish our piece, it became increasingly obvious that the fate of farming animals during floods wasn’t of interest to most of the media,” said Martin.

I’m glad they finally found a home at Voxeurop.

The same challenges - antipathy, lack of information, etc - also play out in conflict zones where livestock and their sufferings are often overlooked.

In a LinkedIn post, Jackson Zee, a conflict and disaster frameworks expert with animal welfare organisation Four Paws, pointed this out, and called for animals to be integrated into the very beginning of humanitarian planning and evacuation strategies.

“We must acknowledge that no community is truly evacuated until its sentient members are considered,” he wrote. “Protecting these silent victims is also a prerequisite for a community’s recovery. The collapse of animal health infrastructure creates a vacuum that quickly fills with secondary crises, including public health threats that drain already broken resources.”

This personal account by Robert, a 49-year-old Lebanese farmer, who risked his life to find fodder for his cows and then had to leave them behind as Israeli bombardment worsened in late 2024, is also worth reading. It was part of an interactive series about displaced Lebanese people by The New Humanitarian.

Inconvenient Questions

• Why are livestock still absent from disaster planning in one of the world’s most climate-exposed regions?

• Why do we accept systems where farmers bear the full cost of losses that are increasingly predictable and systemic?

• What does it mean to recognise animals as sentient beings in law, if their deaths in disasters are neither counted nor meaningfully compensated?

The contradiction becomes even clearer when placed alongside current concerns about fertiliser shortages triggered by the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran.

Fertiliser is not just about crops. A substantial share is used to grow feed such as maize and soy bean. Europe is particularly exposed:

1. The bloc is highly dependent on imported crops to feed its animals, and

2. Its farming systems are fertiliser intensive.

When fertiliser prices rise or availability goes down ⟶ higher feed costs ⟶ higher livestock production costs.

Yet even as these systemic risks become more visible, policy attention remains selective.

• Why is so much political energy spent on symbolic issues, like naming conventions for plant-based foods, while structural vulnerabilities in livestock systems remain unaddressed?

• Who benefits from this imbalance?

• If meat consumption is framed as cultural heritage or the best source of protein, why do the animals at its centre remain largely invisible when they suffer, and only become visible once they are part of the food system?

There is no shortage of lobbying power in the livestock sector. Investigations — including our own at Lighthouse Reports — have exposed how the meat lobby has successfully stymied animal welfare reforms and how they attempted to undermine making agriculture more sustainable. Many other media outlets have done the same.

A recent analysis by Animal Equality also showed that EU Commissioners responsible for animal welfare and agriculture – Olivér Várhelyi and Christophe Hansen – and their cabinets held at least 46 meetings with representatives of the meat, poultry and dairy industries between December 2024 and March 2026, reported The European. In contrast, the Commissioners met seven times with animal welfare organisations.

So the question is not whether livestock matters politically.

It clearly does.

The question is: why does that attention so rarely translate into protecting animals - or the farmers who depend on them - when it matters most?

Food For Thought

“‘Live…stock’ is, in itself, a term worth questioning. They are stock for our consumption and.. as it happens, they are also alive. It struck me in many conversations that we were talking about beings that somehow seemed devoid of life, and whose suffering was treated as just another parameter to be adjusted, if it served human needs. Our story is yet another reminder that the way we care for farm animals is not right.” - Louisa

Thin’s Pickings

1. What is Climate-flation? - Land & Climate Review

   An interview with Professor Pete Smith, one of the UK’s most prominent climate and environmental scientists who has been a lead author for IPCC and IPBES several times and is currently Professor of Soils & Global Change at the University of Aberdeen.

   His new project examines ‘climateflation’: “how extreme weather events disrupt harvests and supply chains and drive up food prices”.
   

2. We’re letting big corporations gamble with our lives. Act now, or the food could run out. - The Guardian

   George Monbiot is not everyone’s cup of tea, but he’s a brilliant writer who brings a much-needed urgency to this issue.

   “The same factors that would have brought down the financial system, were it not for a bailout amounting to trillions of dollars, now threaten to bring down the food system.”
   

3. Good pieces on the fertiliser crisis

   Conflict in the Middle East: The perfect storm for price gouging in Africa - Shamba Centre for Food & Climate

   Fertiliser Giants Make Farmers and Food Production More Vulnerable - Food & Power

   Middle East war is another wake-up call for fossil fuel-reliant food systems - Climate Home News

   The Strait We’re In - Raj Patel

   The Strait of Hormuz shock - Gawain invites you to read this…
   FAO Chief Economist warns of severe global food security risks from disruption to Strait of Hormuz trade corridor - FAO
   The global food crisis unleashed by the war - Financial Times
   

4. The 20 Best Food Scenes in Movies - The New York Times

   Something fun to end what is otherwise a serious issue of Thin Ink. Happy to see some of my favourites - Tampopo, Ratatouille, Moon Struck - made the list.

As always, please feel free to share this post and send tips and thoughts on bluesky @thinink.bsky.social, mastodon @ThinInk@journa.host, my LinkedIn page, twitter @thinink, or via e-mail thin@thin-ink.net.