15.1 Introduction
In the coming decades, cities and other local governments will need to transform their infrastructure as part of their climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts. When they do, they have the opportunity to build more resilient, sustainable, and accommodating infrastructure for humans and non-humans alike. From industrial farming practices to the wildlife trade, human interactions with animals currently pose significant threats, including infectious disease transmission, environmental degradation, and biodiversity loss. These problems are best addressed through a One Health approach, which recognises the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health.
Animal welfare, in particular, is often neglected in public policy. Cities can address this gap by incorporating animal welfare into their local policymaking.Footnote 1 Some governments may consider establishing a dedicated animal welfare planning process that supports animal habitats, shelters, food, and other needs. Governments can also add proxies for wild animal welfare into their existing monitoring and evaluation efforts. They can pursue institutional reform, including appointing officials or establishing offices for animal welfare to coordinate city-wide efforts. And they can pursue infrastructural reform, by implementing co-beneficial land use and built environment policies for humans, non-humans, and the environment.
This chapter makes the general case for including animal welfare in local policymaking, with special focus on institutional and infrastructural change. We start by discussing the importance of animal welfare for the One Health framework, along with key questions about animal welfare. We then discuss general principles and policies that can guide cities in building multispecies urban infrastructure. For example, cities can implement bird-friendly building materials, improve road design and operation, provide guidance for incorporating animal shelter and habitat into green infrastructure, and shift their lawn maintenance practices. These policies benefit humans, animals, and the environment alike. By researching and adopting these and other, similar policies, cities can work towards creating environments that support all species within their boundaries.
15.2 One Health, Animal Welfare, and Theories of Change
15.2.1 Expanding One Health
One Health is a policy framework that recognises that human, animal, and environmental health are linked. Accordingly, the One Health framework requires a ‘collaborative, multisectoral, and transdisciplinary approach – working at the local, regional, national, and global levels’.Footnote 2 The UN Food and Agricultural Organization describes One Health as an ‘integrated approach’ with implications for ‘food security, sustainable agriculture, food safety, antimicrobial resistance’ and more.Footnote 3 Given these links between human, animal, and environmental health, governments can improve outcomes for human health and well-being in many contexts by improving outcomes for animal and environmental health as well.
To see why One Health is valuable, consider how humans interact with captive animals, particularly farmed animals. Humans breed, raise, and kill more than 100 billion vertebrates and more than one trillion invertebrates for food each year.Footnote 4 These practices not only harm and kill many animals, but also contribute to the spread of infectious diseases (particularly bird and pig farming) and to land-use and climate change (particularly cow farming).Footnote 5 By thinking about human, animal, and environmental health holistically, we can build future food systems that treat humans, animals, and the environment better at the same time.
Similarly, consider how humans interact with wild animals. Humans breed or capture tens of millions of wild land animals and hundreds of millions of wild aquatic animals for a variety of purposes each year.Footnote 6 But as with animal farming, many forms of the wildlife trade are bad for humans, animals, and the environment. They harm and kill many animals, contribute to the spread of infectious diseases (according to one study, animal farming and the wildlife trade are the two main causes of disease spread among wild animals),Footnote 7 and contribute to biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse (particularly industrial fishing).Footnote 8 Once again, by thinking about these issues holistically, we can seek alternatives to the wildlife trade that are better for all.
However, while the One Health framework is valuable, current applications have important limitations.Footnote 9 One limitation is that current applications focus on benefiting humans, rather than on benefiting human and non-human animals alike.Footnote 10 One Health recognises that human, animal, and environmental health are linked, but responds to these links by treating animal health as a resource to protect for the sake of human health.Footnote 11 However, many non-human animals are living, conscious beings with sentience and agency; their health matters not only to us but also, and primarily, to them. By taking an instrumentalising approach to animal protection, we miss opportunities to improve animal health for the sake of the animals themselves.
Another limitation is that current applications of One Health focus on health in particular rather than on health and welfare in general. Of course, this focus on health makes sense, because health impacts are easier to measure than welfare impacts, and because health is a ‘primary good’ that makes possible the pursuit of all other goods. But for human and non-human animals alike, health is not an end in itself and protecting our health is not always sufficient for supporting our flourishing in life. By focusing narrowly on our health rather than widely on what brings meaning and value to our lives, we miss opportunities to improve not only human and animal health but also human and animal lives and societies.Footnote 12
To see how these limitations can lead us astray, return to our treatment of captive animals. Many humans assume, rightly, that proper regard for animal and environmental health requires making changes to animal farming. However, when we assess our options without considering animals as stakeholders, and without considering animal welfare at all, we end up causing and allowing unnecessary harm to vulnerable animals. For example, many experts are proposing further intensification of animal farming to reduce the amount of land used per animal, despite the fact that further intensification risks increasing animal suffering.Footnote 13 Many experts are proposing a shift from cow to chicken farming for the same reason, despite the same trade-off.Footnote 14
Similarly, many humans assume, rightly, that proper regard for animal and environmental health requires making changes to the wildlife trade. But once again, when we assess our options without considering animals as stakeholders, and without considering animal welfare at all, we end up causing and allowing unnecessary harm. For example, we tend to set limits on the wildlife trade when we see animals as vectors for disease (for instance, bans of live markets during COVID-19), or when we see particular practices as ecologically harmful (for instance, bans of ‘unsustainable fisheries’). But as long as we see the exploitation and extermination of other animals as compatible with human health, we tend to permit them.Footnote 15
Of course, there may be cases where human and non-human interests conflict. At least at present, many humans rely on animal use industries for food, income, and other vital needs. Additionally, many animals do pose threats to humans, and nonviolent resolutions to these conflicts are not always available. However, to say that we should consider human and non-human health and welfare is not necessarily to say that we should always avoid practices that harm animals in cases where these practices are deemed necessary. Instead, it is merely to say that we should consider the impacts of policies on all relevant stakeholders, and we should seek ways of improving human and animal lives together where possible.
15.2.2 Assessing Wild Animal Welfare
Unfortunately, political will is not the only obstacle that stands in the way of legal and political consideration of wild animal welfare. A more fundamental obstacle is that we currently lack the ability to predict and control the net effects of our actions and policies on wild animal welfare. This is partly due to our limited knowledge about wild animal welfare and is partly due to our limited capacity to act on the knowledge that we have. Before we can find a way forward, we need to identify where we are and where we need to go. So, in this section, we briefly survey several basic questions about animal welfare that we need to answer before we can responsibly estimate the net effects of our actions and policies on wild animal welfare.
To the extent that animal welfare is currently measured in policy contexts (which, to be clear, is a limited extent), it is typically measured for alignment with the ‘five freedoms’. These were developed in the early 1990s and were the first metrics to capture, or attempt to capture, the subjective experience of animals in addition to their health and behaviours.Footnote 16 They include: (1) freedom from hunger or thirst; (2) freedom from discomfort; (3) freedom from pain, injury, or disease; (4) freedom to express normal behaviour; and (5) freedom from fear and distress. Each freedom has corresponding provisions that are recommended; for example, to ensure that an animal has freedom from hunger or thirst, the standard recommendation is to provide the animal with access to fresh water and a healthy diet.
While the five freedoms represent an important step towards the inclusion of animal welfare in public policy, they are incomplete measures of animal welfare. One of their limitations is that they are open to interpretation, which means that a range of environments could arguably meet their criteria.Footnote 17 Another limitation is that they represent what humans believe is important for animal welfare. They are not backed by animal welfare science as the five most important freedoms to animals. A third limitation is that they focus only on freedom from negative states, when positive animal welfare should be considered a benefit in policy making.Footnote 18 A more complete metric of animal welfare might track positive experiences as well as negative ones and represent the balance between them.
To develop a better framework, however, we need to answer several basic questions about animal welfare. First: Which animals are welfare subjects? That is, which animals are capable of experiencing morally significant benefits and harms? Does this capacity require sentience (the ability to suffer), agency (the ability to pursue goals), or only life (the ability to survive or procreate)? And if it requires sentience or agency, which animals have these features? The empirical evidence supports at least a non-negligible chance that all vertebrates and some invertebrates have these features.Footnote 19 But to the degree that we remain uncertain about particular animals (say, insects), how, if at all, should they factor into welfare assessments?
Second: How do our actions and policies affect these animals? When we attempt to help wild animals, our interventions can easily reverberate across vast ecological webs. Thus, if we want to assess the net effect of our actions and policies on wild animal welfare, then we need to consider not only the direct and intended effects on some animals, but also the indirect and unintended effects on all animals. That requires improving our understanding of natural systems in general, so that we can find order in what currently appears to be chaos. This project is already difficult when we restrict welfare assessments to, say, mammals and birds. It will be much harder when we expand these assessments to include all animals who merit consideration.
Third: Which effects are good and bad for particular animals? Many humans assume that we benefit animals when we extend their lives and expand their populations, and that we harm them when we shorten their lives and contract their populations. However, if an individual animal experiences more suffering than happiness, then extending their life may not be good for them. Similarly, if a group of animals experience more suffering than happiness overall, then expanding this population may not be good for its members overall. Thus, even if we knew how our actions and policies would affect wild animals, we still might not know which actions and policies are good or bad unless we know which effects are beneficial or harmful.
Fourth: How can we compare welfare impacts across species? Suppose we agree about which impacts are good and bad for particular animals. In this case, we still need to ask how good and bad these impacts are for these animals. Do an elephant, a mouse, and an ant all have equally strong interests, such that we should give them all equal weight in our welfare assessments? Or is the strength of their interests a function of, say, their cognitive complexity and longevity, such that we should give more weight to the elephant than to the mouse, and more weight to the mouse than to the ant? Because smaller animals tend to have larger populations, how much weight we give these animals will end up mattering a lot.
Finally: How should we factor welfare assessments into our decisions? Ethics, law, and policy are about more than promoting welfare, at least in practice. They are also about respecting rights, honouring relationships, and working within our epistemic and practical limitations. When we consider all relevant factors, we might find that even if animals have a lot at stake in our decisions, there is a limit to how much we can, and should, support them. However, our claim in this chapter is merely that, for all we know now, we might be able to improve our treatment of animals at least somewhat. And insofar as we can improve our treatment of animals in a responsible, achievable, sustainable way, we owe it to them to try.
15.2.3 Improving Animal Welfare, One Step at a Time
Given the complexity of these issues, one might think that we should wait for more information before we attempt to improve our treatment of animal populations, particularly wild animal populations. After all, until we know more about which animals are welfare subjects, how our policies will affect them, which effects are good or bad for them, how to compare welfare across species, and how to factor welfare assessments into our policy decisions, our attempts to improve animal welfare can easily be ineffective or counterproductive. In the meantime, vulnerable human populations still need support too. Perhaps we should prioritise improving human lives while we wait for more information about how to improve non-human lives.
However, it would be a mistake to delay consideration of non-human animals for these reasons. First, these issues are urgent, and there are risks in both directions. Again, humans kill more than 100 billion captive vertebrates, more than a trillion captive invertebrates, more than a trillion wild vertebrates, and quadrillions of wild invertebrates every year. In the future, human-caused environmental changes will amplify our effects on non-human populations considerably. Thus, there is no risk-free option in this context. While considering animal welfare might lead us to mistakenly cause new harms, continuing to neglect animal welfare will lead us to amplify – and potentially lock in – current patterns of harm, exploitation, and extermination.
Second, we may never be able to completely answer these questions, and bad assessments can still be better than nothing at all. Determining how to treat wild animals requires addressing fundamental issues in ethics and science, including questions about the nature of other minds and the value of other lives. We will likely not be certain about these issues anytime soon. At the same time, we are not completely in the dark about these issues either, and we have sophisticated tools for making policy decisions about important and difficult issues under risk and uncertainty, such as precautionary principles and expected value principles.Footnote 20 We should do the best we can with what we have as we continue to research these issues over time.
Third, bad assessments can pave the way for better assessments. Part of how we can learn how to improve our treatment of animals is by attempting to improve our treatment of animals and then studying the effects. Of course, this is not to say that we should experiment with risky, costly, harmful, large-scale interventions simply to study the effects; it would be bad to destroy the environment simply to confirm that destroying the environment is bad! Instead, the idea is that experimenting with reasonably safe, low-cost, small-scale interventions can have both practical and epistemic benefits. Practically, it can help at least some animals in the short term, and epistemically, it can teach us how to help more animals in the long run.
Fourth, knowledge is not the only bottleneck; capacity and motivation are as well. We already know how to improve our treatment of animals in many ways, but we lack the ability and political will necessary to act on this knowledge. Thus, it would be naive for us to simply spend 100 years developing knowledge about animal welfare and then expect the world to be ready to act. We instead need to develop relevant knowledge, capacity, and motivation simultaneously. Experimenting with reasonably safe, low-cost, small-scale interventions can help in all these ways, as it can contribute not only to the development of animal welfare research, but also to the development of legal and political institutions for considering animal welfare.
Fifth, many changes can be co-beneficial for humans, (many) animals, and the environment. The One Health policy framework is a reminder that improving our treatment of animals and the environment can have positive effects for us as well. Of course, this is not to deny the reality of trade-offs both within and across species. Few if any policies will benefit everyone. Still, if we at least consider everyone when making decisions, then we might find that we can improve our treatment of humans and non-humans at the same time; or, at least, that we can improve our treatment of non-humans without worsening our treatment of humans. Experimenting with these kinds of seemingly co-beneficial options is a good place to start.
Finally, many decisions can involve path dependence and even a ‘lock in’ effect, particularly decisions regarding the built environment. In particular, governments are or, at least, will soon be spending vast amounts of money to build more resilient and sustainable infrastructure in the face of climate change. If we at least consider animal welfare when we build this infrastructure, then we might be able to identify relatively safe, low-cost, small-scale changes that appear to benefit humans, animals, and the environment. And of course, it would be cheaper and faster to change our infrastructure once, with both human and non-human interests in mind, than to change it once for humans and then all over again for everyone else.
In our view, these reflections support the following theory of change for wild animal welfare. As we research basic ethical and scientific issues regarding wild animal welfare, we should also experiment with relatively safe, low-cost, small-scale interventions that appear co-beneficial for humans, (many) animals, and the environment in the short term, and that will help us to build the knowledge, capacity, and motivation necessary to pursue better interventions over time. And in order to produce these further effects, we should focus on infrastructural and institutional changes that can involve path dependence, and to develop partnerships between researchers and policymakers so that we can study the effects of policy experiments.
15.3 Multispecies Institutions, Principles, and Policies
Despite its importance, animal welfare is still neglected in environmental, climate change, and sustainable development policy.Footnote 21 Wild animal welfare in particular has been overlooked by policymakers at the international, national, and subnational levels.Footnote 22 While action is needed at every level, we focus here on local government policies on land use and the built environment for several reasons. First, cities have the opportunity to test out innovative policies that take into account and promote wild animal welfare.Footnote 23 Second, cities have a responsibility to consider wild animal welfare as many wild animals already reside in cities, and many more may migrate to cities as a result of human-caused environmental changes.Footnote 24 Third, cities typically have authority over land use and infrastructure choices that affect humans and animals.Footnote 25 This combination of opportunity, responsibility, and authority positions cities to take action on wild animal welfare in the near term.
15.3.1 Building Local Government Capacity to Advance Wild Animal Welfare
Cities can begin to incorporate wild animal welfare into local plans, monitoring, institutions, and policies.Footnote 26 Through these cross-cutting actions, cities can build their capacity for promoting wild animal welfare consistently across local policy areas.Footnote 27
15.3.1.1 Plans
Cities can incorporate wild animal welfare into ongoing city planning processes and consider developing a separate animal welfare planning process. Existing city plans for climate action, green infrastructure, capital investment, parks, and biodiversity, among others, are likely to impact local wild animals. Cities could shape these plans to better consider and support wild animal welfare. For example, local parks, green infrastructure, and climate action plans could require consideration of food, habitat, shelter, and shade benefits for wild animals. These considerations might affect the tree and plant species used for planting or ecosystem maintenance and restoration decisions. For example, cities could leverage urban forest assessment tools to model the effects on bird habitat from management decisions.Footnote 28 The City of Amsterdam, in The Netherlands, is a leading example of incorporating wild animal welfare into existing city planning processes. For one, their Green Infrastructure Vision planning document specifically includes ‘care for the wellbeing of animals’ as part of the plan.Footnote 29
In addition, cities considering animal welfare more holistically may choose to adopt a separate animal welfare planning process. Amsterdam is again at the forefront of animal welfare planning with their Animals Agenda.Footnote 30 The Agenda coordinates city policy and planning processes to support the welfare of wild and domestic animals. It identifies important policies for animal welfare, coordinates different city departments and their plans to implement these policies, and establishes monitoring and accountability processes for implementing the Agenda. To benefit wild animals, the Agenda advances nature-inclusive construction policies, maintenance of city-owned meadows to provide optimal habitats for meadow birds, the removal of barriers to wild animal movement in the city, policies to reduce light pollution impacts on wild animals, and more.Footnote 31
15.3.1.2 Monitoring
Cities can also identify opportunities for monitoring and gathering baseline data on wild animal welfare. While measuring wild animal welfare remains a challenge, cities can at least begin to take measures of environmental conditions that may affect wild animal welfare and physical health or behaviours of wild animals that may be indicative of their welfare. Measures of relevant environmental conditions include: exposure to extreme temperatures, anthropogenic noise, and artificial light at night. Measures of wild animals’ health may include rates of disease and starvation among wild animals or observations of behaviours consistent with states of stress or relaxation.Footnote 32 Importantly, monitoring for wild animal welfare should focus not only on wild animals that belong to a threatened or vulnerable species, because animals who belong to vulnerable species are not the only ones who matter.
To start, cities can look for opportunities to include measurement of wild animals’ environmental and health conditions in existing city monitoring efforts across all departments, wherever possible. Some cities already monitor wildlife as part of their park management or biodiversity planning efforts. For example, Chicago, IL has a Nature and Wildlife Plan with a goal of ‘[m]onitoring the effects of management and conducting applied ecological research’ including establishing baseline inventories of natural and restoration areas, setting up monitoring for endangered species, and researching how ecosystem restoration affects migratory birds.Footnote 33 Chicago’s efforts could begin to incorporate or pilot assessments of wild animal welfare.
Similarly, the more than 100 cities globally with biodiversity plans could begin to assess wild animal welfare, including in their selection of biodiversity indices.Footnote 34 For example, the Urban Nature Index – a city self-assessment for biodiversity and ecological performance – includes measures of light and noise pollution.Footnote 35 Both of these measures would gather information on environmental conditions that may affect wild animal welfare.Footnote 36 Cities can also look for opportunities to partner with researchers and universities to pilot wild animal welfare assessments of local land use and built environment policies.
15.3.1.3 Institutions
Cities can build institutional capacity to support wild animal welfare by appointing an official or creating an office for animal welfare. This office would serve as a coordinating body for promoting animal welfare across city departments, planning, and policy. They could lead an animal welfare planning process in the city, develop checklists for each city agency to ensure the consideration of wild animal welfare, evaluate technical guidance for opportunities to promote wild animal welfare, propose budget items for animal welfare-related city action, and more. The office could also identify how existing wild animal monitoring and data collection in the city could better incorporate measurement of wild animal welfare. Ideally, there would be an official or part of the animal welfare office dedicated specifically to wild animals.
For example, the cities of New York, NY and Amsterdam, Netherlands have both created offices or appointed city officials for animal welfare. The New York City Mayor’s Office of Animal Welfare was created to ‘advise and assist the Mayor in the coordination and cooperation among City agencies that are involved in animal welfare administration, regulation, management or programs’.Footnote 37 The Office and its precursor, the animal welfare liaison, have supported a municipal non-lethal deer management program, the use of bird-friendly building materials, a city-wide ban on wild animals in circuses, and more.Footnote 38 In Amsterdam, Netherlands, there is a Councillor for Animal Welfare that coordinates the Animal Agenda planning process and policies for animal welfare across city departments.
15.3.1.4 Policies
Cities can implement policies that promote wild animal welfare on city-owned or city-controlled land and on private lands in the city. Cities can seek to provide environmental conditions that support wild animal welfare, including providing food, habitat, and shelter for wild animals; promoting habitat connectivity and freedom of movement for wild animals; alleviating extreme temperatures; reducing noise, light, and air pollution impacts on wild animals; and reducing harmful wild animal collisions with buildings and vehicles. Cities can shape these environmental conditions through their design of green infrastructure and road layouts, management of parks and lawns, and building materials and operations in city buildings and property, among other policy actions.
For private lands, cities can pass wildlife ordinances that incorporate multiple land use and built environment policies to promote wild animal welfare. Wildlife ordinances should be flexible and responsive to developments in scientific understanding of wild animals and the hazards they face. For example, city ordinances can define bird-friendly building materials based on the American Bird Conservancy Material Threat Factor Reference Standard, which can be updated as new information becomes available.Footnote 39 Los Angeles, CA has a wildlife ordinance that applies to private lands in a designated Wildlife District.Footnote 40 This wildlife ordinance combines multiple policies on private lands that promote animal habitat, shelter, and food sources; freedom of animal movement; and reduction of light pollution, among other environmental conditions that may support positive wild animal welfare. These policies include wildlife-friendly fencing, retaining native trees and large trees that provide greatest wildlife benefits, limiting outdoor lighting that could harm some wild animals, and using bird-friendly building materials to reduce animal–window collisions and associated mortality and harm.Footnote 41
15.3.2 Sample Local Policy Recommendations
Cities can also implement specific policies that support not only wild animal welfare, but also human health and climate change mitigation or adaptation. They can begin with relatively safe, low-cost, small-scale interventions that appear to be co-beneficial for humans, (many) animals, and the environment, reflecting a One Health approach to local policy making. Such policies have low risks and many benefits. Over time, they will help us to build the knowledge, capacity, and motivation necessary to pursue more effective and widespread interventions in the future. There are a range of local policies on land use and the built environment that reflect a One Health approach, but this chapter focuses on a few illustrative examples that have the potential to benefit humans, animals, and the climate with relatively few welfare trade-offs.Footnote 42 The following examples can be implemented on private lands via local ordinance and on city-owned lands.
15.3.2.1 Bird-Friendly Building Materials
Cities should consider implementing bird-friendly building materials policies to not only reduce animal–window collisions but also improve building energy efficiency. Scientists estimate that bird–window collisions kill up to one billion birds annually in the United States alone, which does not include measures of pain and suffering from non-fatal window collisions.Footnote 43 Researchers have identified that building glass, exterior materials, and lighting are major contributors to bird-window collisions.Footnote 44 To respond to this, some cities have begun to pass local ordinances mandating or providing incentives for the use of bird-friendly materials, including those that also improve building energy efficiency, thus reducing greenhouse gas emissions and associated climate impacts.Footnote 45 In general, many existing local ordinances mandating bird-friendly building materials apply only to new buildings or major alterations to the building exterior, not to existing buildings.Footnote 46 Cities could move toward requirements or incentives to retrofit existing buildings with bird-friendly materials.
Local Law 15 in New York, NY is a leading example of a local bird-friendly building materials policy. Enacted in 2020, Local Law 15 requires bird-friendly material on 90 per cent of the 75 feet of building exterior above grade, 12 feet above green roof systems, and on some other hazardous structures for birds at any height. The law requires bird-friendly material on any new buildings and where there are major alterations to exterior glazing of an existing building. Importantly, this law is flexible to advances in understanding of bird-friendly materials; it defines ‘bird-friendly material’ where the maximum material threat factor is 25 or less, referencing the American Bird Conservancy Bird Collision Deterrence Material Threat Factor Reference Standard.Footnote 47
This ordinance could be strengthened by requiring retrofits of existing buildings over time, even if they do not have a significant alteration to the exterior glazing, and increasing the height to 100 feet above grade, like the Washington DC Migratory Local Wildlife Protection Act passed in 2023.Footnote 48 Other cities and localities have taken an incentive-based approach, such as Arlington County, VA, which allows developers to access bonus density through the city’s Green Building Incentive Program when they include bird-friendly materials.Footnote 49
15.3.2.2 Road Design and Operation
Cities should consider redesigning roads and road operation to promote the health and safety of humans, animals, and the environment. Road deaths and injuries are a significant threat to both humans and wild animals, with one to two million annual collisions between motorists and wild animals in the United States alone.Footnote 50 Roads also produce levels of anthropogenic noise that may harm wild animals by impacting their communication, fitness, foraging, and movement patterns.Footnote 51 As cities redesign streets to reduce human traffic fatalities and respond to climate change risks like flooding and sea-level rise, they can also take wild animal welfare into account.
There are several road design policies that cities could consider implementing to benefit humans, wild animals, and the environment. As a threshold matter, cities could consider wild animal welfare in local transportation planning and adopt a modified Complete Streets Policy Framework that considers wild animals in road design.Footnote 52 For design elements, cities can construct overpasses or underpasses for wild animals to maintain habitat connectivity and reduce animal–vehicle collisions. For example, Los Angeles, CA is constructing an overpass over the 101 freeway to support the safe movement of mountain lions, bobcats, and other animals, and Concord, MA has constructed four underpasses that have reduced habitat fragmentation and are used by at least thirty-two different species of animals.Footnote 53
In addition to road design, cities can consider creating some pedestrian-only streets or implementing seasonal, night-time, or temporary road closures to reduce traffic noise and vehicle collisions. For example, King Road in Burlington, ON, Canada is closed for a few weeks each spring to permit the safe road crossing of Jefferson salamanders in their breeding migration period.Footnote 54 Cities may consider permanent pedestrian-only streets to not only reduce impacts of vehicles on animals but also improve walkability and wellbeing for humans.
15.3.3 Green Infrastructure Design
Cities should consider how their green infrastructure (GI) can better support the welfare of wild animals. GI – including green roofs, rain gardens, bioswales, retention basins, and green spaces – can help cities and their residents adapt to the impacts of climate change. Many cities have begun to implement GI to address storm water run-off and flooding, combat air pollution, and reduce the urban heat island effect.Footnote 55 In addition to the climate and human health benefits, GI can take into account wild animals in GI planning, design, and implementation. GI can provide habitat, shelter, and food sources for wild animals and mitigate extreme heat which can harm wild animals.Footnote 56
Cities can start by including wild animals in their GI planning. For example, Harford County, MD has a green infrastructure plan that lists providing high-quality wildlife habitat and wildlife corridors as an explicit goal in the GI network.Footnote 57 Beyond planning, cities can require consideration of wild animals in GI design and siting and issue technical guidance and GI design manuals that include consideration of wild animals. Guidance and design manuals can require plant selection for GI to provide habitat, shelter, and food sources to wild animals that could enhance their welfare. In Lancaster, PA, the city’s GI design manual requires that GI plants are selected in part based on ‘wildlife value’, including habitat, food, and shelter for wild animals.Footnote 58
15.3.4 Lawn Maintenance Practices
Cities should consider supporting lawn maintenance practices that benefit humans, wild animals, and the environment such as prohibiting gas lawn equipment and allowing naturalised lawns. Gas lawn equipment may harm human and wild animal welfare through exposure to high-decibel noise (especially for gas leaf blowers), increased air pollution, and exposure to carcinogenic chemicals and other pollutants.Footnote 59 Gas lawn equipment may further disrupt leaf litter habitat and cover for insects and reptiles, decrease their food availability, and reduce bird nesting material availability.Footnote 60 Over 100 cities in the United States have prohibited the use of gas leaf blowers, including Washington, DC and Maplewood, NJ.Footnote 61 Some cities have implemented electric municipal lawn care equipment or provided rebates to private individuals for switching from gas to electric lawn equipment.Footnote 62 Overall, cities should consider prohibiting or phasing out all gas lawn equipment.
Naturalised lawns may also provide benefits to humans, animals, and the environment. Naturalised lawns typically include a range of native plants of different types and heights, rather than monoculture or turf lawn.Footnote 63 Naturalised lawns can promote climate change mitigation and adaptation by reducing water use in drought conditions, greenhouse gas emissions from lawn fertiliser, and the use of gas lawn equipment.Footnote 64 The benefits of naturalised lawns for wild animal welfare are not well established, but naturalised lawns may promote habitat connectivity and provide wild animals (such as insects) with habitat and food sources.Footnote 65 This is an example where a city could partner with a research institution or otherwise study the effects of naturalised lawn policies on wild animal welfare. To start, cities can at least amend existing local laws to remove height limits for plants in lawns or exempt naturalised lawns from laws limiting plant height. As scientific understanding of wild animal welfare benefits of naturalised lawns develops, cities could go further to provide incentives for naturalised lawns on private lands (including turf grass replacement programs) and install naturalised lawns on non-functional city lawns. A number of cities have already removed plant height limits and implemented incentive programs for naturalised lawns.Footnote 66
15.4 Conclusion
While the One Health framework offers a promising pathway towards creating co-beneficial policies for human, animal, and environmental health, its current applications often fall short of its potential. In particular, they remain human-centric, often overlooking the intrinsic value of non-human animals and their wellbeing. But non-human animals matter for more than just their instrumental value; they matter for their own sakes.
Moreover, current One Health applications often take a narrow emphasis on health outcomes, neglecting other aspects of wellbeing. This may be, in part, because health outcomes are easier to measure than welfare outcomes (which is not, of course, to say that they are easy to measure). But for human and non-human animals alike, health is not an end in itself; we also value human and animal lives and societies. Expanding the One Health approach to account for other outcomes will require building our knowledge about animal welfare. It will also require building the capacity and the political will to act on the knowledge we have.
To advance a One Health approach to local policymaking, cities should seek to incorporate wild animal welfare into their institutions, principles, and policies. Institutionally, cities should consider creating animal welfare planning processes, establishing an office or official for animal welfare, collecting data that could support assessment of wild animal welfare, and other institutional changes.
As we research basic ethical and scientific issues regarding wild animal welfare, we should experiment with relatively safe, low-cost, small-scale interventions that appear co-beneficial for humans, (many) animals, and the environment in the short term. We have outlined examples of four such policies that cities can implement in the chapter: bird-friendly building materials, improved road design and operation, green infrastructure design, and lawn maintenance practices. Implementing them, and monitoring their impact, will help us build the knowledge, capacity, and motivation necessary to pursue increasingly effective and evidence-based interventions over time. As we pursue this work, we will begin to bridge the gap between environmental policy and the wellbeing of humans and non-humans.
