Transformative Climate Actions

This article scrutinizes the potential of transformative climate actions (TCAs) to contribute to social-ecological transformations. It considers the limitations of past climate actions and distinguishes transformative climate actions from the broad array of climate actions that have so far been insufficient to address the multiple crises. We define TCAs as having three key elements: desirable, effective, and feasible. This builds on the IPCC AR6 definition of ‘solutions’ and our past work on transformative innovation. Furthermore, we describe six characteristics that transformative climate actions are likely to have, they include: broadening climate targets to include social-ecological goals, shaping framework conditions, linking pragmatic and radical actions, ensuring basic provisioning while limiting over-consumption, prioritizing avoiding harm, be it emissions or excessive resource use, and lastly acting on multiple levels. We elaborate on each of these characteristics with an example and support from climate literature.