Animal populations are exposed to environmental variation through yearly and seasonal fluctuations, as well as human-induced rapid environmental change. Social behaviour has received growing attention as a potentially important but underappreciated mechanism for resilience to environmental changes. Social interactions shape access to resources, information, protection from predators and opportunities for reproduction. They can also influence how individuals experience and respond to environmental stressors, which relates to the concept of social buffering, a pattern where sociality attenuates the detrimental effects of stressors on individual and population fitness. Such ideas have typically been examined using biogeographic analyses to test whether social living is more prevalent in harsh environments. However, there may also be variation in social behaviour within populations and within an individual's lifespan that serves to maintain or even enhance fitness during environmental changes. In this Special Feature, we present a collection of contributions examining the role of social interactions in maintaining fitness in the face of adverse effects across mammal, reptile and insect species. These studies were conducted under laboratory and field conditions and in response to a wide range of ecological factors, including predation risk, food abundance and interspecific competition. Collectively, we see that social behaviour interacts with environmental variation through multiple pathways, and these behavioural adjustments can have consequences for individual fitness and scale up to affect population performance. Lastly, we offer suggestions for future research directions to address remaining knowledge gaps and advance our understanding of the links between environmental variation, social behaviour, fitness outcomes and population persistence. Such work has the potential to provide valuable insights for management and conservation efforts, which is critically important in a rapidly changing world.
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