Researchers Propose Framework for Climate-Ready Professional Practice

Researchers Aaron Thierry and Mario Veen have developed a conceptual framework arguing that credentialed professionals across diverse fields possess a distinct capacity to drive systemic climate change. Published in Frontiers in Education, the hypothesis and theory article posits that professionals in sectors such as health, law, education, and the built environment are often overlooked in climate governance, despite their specialized knowledge and institutional authority. The study treats the professional role as a socially constructed position, formed initially in higher education and subsequently through accreditation and institutional norms. These norms can unintentionally reinforce unsustainable practices, making universities and accreditation bodies central sites for forming climate-ready professionals. The authors argue that reorienting professional norms and institutions is essential for expertise to contribute effectively to climate mitigation and adaptation.

The paper identifies a central tension in the role of professionals: they hold both the capacity to catalyze meaningful climate action and the potential to reproduce unsustainable structures. This reproduction is not a matter of bad faith but is the default outcome of professional socialization, which is designed to produce stable and predictable conduct within established systems. The same mechanisms that make professionals trustworthy make them conservative by default. To overcome this inertia, the authors propose a framework for enabling climate-aligned practice, organized around three interrelated stages: crisis translation, ethical activation, and institutional pathways. These stages operate across multiple levels, from individual practitioners to professional associations and the wider policy context.

Crisis translation is the first stage of the framework, involving the articulation of climate change in the specific terms of each profession’s core mission. For health professionals, this frames the climate crisis as a public health emergency, posing threats to morbidity, mortality, and health system stability. For legal practitioners, it is framed as a challenge to justice and governance, engaging questions of human rights, long-term liability, and intergenerational fairness. For educators, it requires cultivating systemic understanding and ethical reasoning to prepare students for a climate-altered world. By expressing climate change in the values and priorities of each profession, the authors argue that climate action becomes part of the core mandate rather than an optional or peripheral concern.

Once climate change is translated into profession-specific terms, ethical activation converts that recognition into obligation. Professional codes, oaths, and ethical guidelines must expand to encompass environmental justice and long-range ecological responsibility as central professional obligations. In healthcare, growing scholarship supports embedding planetary health within clinical ethics, acknowledging that choices affecting human health are inseparable from ecological conditions. In other fields, ethical standards should similarly incorporate environmental justice. The authors note that in psychology, recent analysis finds that several professional ethics codes already frame climate stewardship as a societal responsibility, providing a basis for treating climate engagement as integral to professional practice.

Institutional pathways determine whether activated practitioners scale into durable change or are quietly reabsorbed into existing norms. Ethical commitments alone are insufficient unless supported by the institutions that form and sustain professional identity. Universities and training programmes shape how emerging practitioners conceive their roles, yet climate-related instruction remains uneven across many disciplines. Regulatory bodies and credentialing systems define what constitutes competent practice, and licensure requirements could encourage attention to environmental impacts. Workplaces then determine whether these skills can be enacted through workflow redesign and revised procurement practices. Professional societies also play a critical role by providing guidance and frameworks that reinforce both individual and collective action.

The authors illustrate the framework through case studies in health, law, and education, revealing how professional norms and training can either entrench unsustainable systems or catalyze systemic transformation. In healthcare, which accounts for around 5% of global emissions, professionals can reduce emissions through sustainable procurement and low-carbon treatment pathways. However, the sector remains oriented toward high-impact interventions that consume large amounts of materials and energy. In law, professionals can push back against high-carbon projects, but often operate within an adversarial system that requires them to defend high-pollution industries. In education, programmes can equip students with climate skills, yet many rarely integrate sustainability content, preparing students for careers embedded within environmentally harmful economic systems.

The formation of the climate-ready professional is heavily influenced by higher education and accreditation. The authors argue that what universities teach, and what licensing bodies require, shapes whether new entrants reproduce the systems that drive climate change or learn to interrupt them. Many institutions continue to perpetuate unsustainable norms; for instance, medical programmes often emphasize technologically driven biomedical models rather than preventive, population-wide approaches. Law schools rarely function as sites oriented to climate action, with many steering graduates into roles that enable fossil-fuel sector expansion. Teacher-training programmes frequently omit meaningful engagement with environmental justice, reinforcing anthropocentric assumptions in their lessons.

Accreditation and licensing bodies act as gatekeepers that significantly determine which competencies confer professional legitimacy. If climate-related competencies were embedded as formal requirements for certification, climate responsibility would become institutionalized across entire fields. Evidence suggests that these bodies are well placed to convene educators, employers, and regulators to develop shared standards for climate-aware practice. In Australian engineering education, analysis shows that when accreditation standards fail to require explicit sustainability learning outcomes, universities generally do not integrate sustainability into core curricula. In contrast, accreditation frameworks in ecological management list defined competencies that guide curricular design, demonstrating the power of formal standards to shape professional training.

Professional societies serve as norm entrepreneurs in climate action, forming a central institutional architecture through which professions uphold standards and public credibility. These bodies can broaden their remit to include environmental responsibility and sustainability. Medical associations are increasingly developing sustainability-focused guidance for clinical practice, and some are assessing the carbon intensity of clinical activities. In the legal field, the UK Law Society released a climate change resolution committing solicitors to pursue climate-conscious legal practice, including science-aligned operational emissions targets. These initiatives demonstrate how professional bodies can shift entire fields toward climate-attentive practice instead of relying on a few individual champions.

Collective organization further amplifies professional influence, ranging from internal coordination to extra-institutional activism. In the UK, senior representatives from multiple health organizations urged the Prime Minister to reject new fossil-fuel projects, illustrating how professional institutions can deploy their legitimacy to shape government decision-making. However, the costs of such engagement can be significant. In the UK, two general practitioners have faced fitness to practice proceedings for climate activism, highlighting a regulatory gap where guidelines do not adequately specify duties in responding to climate emergencies. Punitive responses deter climate engagement and weaken collective moral authority, sending a damaging signal about whose interests professional regulation serves.

The authors acknowledge that their analysis focuses primarily on credentialed professionals in health, law, and education, reflecting a particular socio-institutional slice that privileges formalized occupational groups. This focus risks overlooking the experiences of workers in precarious, informal, or unionized sectors, whose contributions are equally important for climate mitigation and adaptation. The authors emphasize that a fair and inclusive sustainability transition must center workers’ perspectives and collective bargaining, rather than focusing narrowly on credentialed professionals.

Ultimately, the paper argues that every job is a climate job, and that professionals have a responsibility to reorient their practice to strengthen resilience and climate justice. Achieving systemic transformation will require alignment and cooperation across multiple professional spheres and institutional settings. When professionals from diverse areas mobilize individually and collectively, their aggregate influence could help steer societies toward futures that are more environmentally sustainable and socially just. The framework provides a generalizable model for how expertise, ethical values, and institutional authority can translate into systemic change, offering a roadmap for professionals to act on the defining challenge of the time.

Subject of Research: A conceptual framework for integrating climate responsibility into professional practice and accreditation

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

Article References: Thierry, A., & Veen, M. (2026). “Every professional is a climate professional”: a framework for climate responsibility in practice. Frontiers in Education, 11, Article 2013555. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.2013555

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.2013555

Keywords: climate change, professional ethics, higher education, accreditation, sustainability, healthcare, legal practice, institutional change, climate action, professional identity, Every, professional