Welfare Footprint Atlas

Illustration of a globe with animals of many species and welfare hotspots

WFI is developing the Welfare Footprint Atlas to make rigorous, quantitative animal-welfare assessment possible at much greater scale. The Atlas is designed to connect the full analytical process: describing animals’ lives, understanding their species-specific needs, determining the extent to which a system or environment meets those needs, assessing biological consequences and experiences, quantifying the intensity and duration of each experience, estimating their prevalence to calculate impacts at the population level, and calculating Welfare Footprints for populations, production systems, products and interventions. Its ambition is to combine scientific evidence, expert review and AI-assisted workflows in a reusable system for comparing alternatives, identifying major sources of welfare loss and exploring improvements. Users would be able to trace estimates to their evidence, assumptions and calculations, inspect uncertainty, and build on previous analyses as knowledge develops. The Atlas is under development. If you are interested in collaborating, or in helping support this initiative, please contact us.