“Every professional is a climate professional”: a framework for climate responsibility in practice

Professionals are an important class of actors often overlooked in efforts to address climate change. Across fields such as health, law, education, the built environment, and media, they combine specialised knowledge, institutional authority, and public credibility, giving them a distinctive capacity to translate sustainability science into practice, reshape organisational systems, and coordinate climate action within their domains. This paper conceptualises professionals as a distinct class of climate actors and develops a generalisable framework for how their expertise, ethical values, and institutional authority can generate systemic change. We treat the professional role as a socially constructed position, formed first in higher education and then through accreditation and institutional norms that can unintentionally reinforce unsustainable practices. Universities and the bodies that accredit their programmes are therefore central sites for forming climate-ready professionals. Building on this, we set out a framework for enabling climate-aligned practice, organised around three interrelated stages: crisis translation, which frames climate change as integral to a profession's mission; ethical activation, which grounds climate responsibility in professional values; and institutional pathways, which shape how climate action is enabled or constrained by professional bodies, training regimes, and organisational systems. These stages operate across multiple levels, from individual practitioners to professional associations and the wider policy context. The analysis turns on a central tension. Professionals hold both the capacity to catalyse meaningful climate action and the potential to reproduce unsustainable structures. Reorienting professional norms, institutions, and practices is therefore essential if their expertise is to contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation.