Miyako H Warrington, David N. Fisher, Jan Komdeur, Natalie Pilakouta, Michael Griesser

1. Climate change is driving a rapid increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme climatic events, leading to substantial alterations in climate patterns and other environmental conditions. These changes are often degrading habitats and increasing thermal, water, and nutritional stress for animals, thereby elevating general stress levels and imposing energetic costs.
2. Social behaviours (i.e., interactions between conspecifics) can be crucial for animals in reducing the costs imposed by these changes. Social behaviours can improve resource acquisition, reduce mortality, and provide a social buffer against physiological stress. Furthermore, helping others during reproduction can provide a buffer against reproductive failure under unfavourable environmental conditions. However, these buffering effects remain vaguely defined and it is unclear how to test for their occurrence.
3. This review explores how social behaviours can shield animals from the negative impacts of climate and environmental changes. We examine how social behaviours can provide benefits across key aspects of life, including foraging success, decreasing energetic costs, reproductive success, and the direct reduction of physiological stress.
4. We synthesize these ideas in the social shielding hypothesis and explain its key components, including the proximate mechanisms that drive social behaviours, the levels of behavioural change (individuals to groups to populations), shielding benefits across all life stages (embryo to senescence), and the ultimate consequences of these behavioural changes.
5. We emphasize that social behaviours can shield individuals under unfavourable conditions, favourable conditions, or independent of conditions, and we provide guidance on how to statistically distinguish between these different types of social shielding. These different shielding mechanisms influence how individuals and populations respond to the negative effects of climate and environmental change.
6. This framework can help predict and manage the negative effects of climate change on animals, thus guiding conservation strategies that support biodiversity and animal welfare.