Care about climate change? The evidence shows these are the most impactful actions you can take

A rising body of research is trying to quantify the impact of personal climate actions. The results show the most powerful impacts may come from some surprising places.

It's hard to get clear-cut evidence on what impact the personal actions we take in our lives can have on climate change.

While there has long been a focus on how to reduce the carbon footprint of what we buy, do and eat, it's harder to pin down the impact of many other measures people take, from community engagement and how we choose to vote, to where we save our money and the impact we can have in our workplaces.

But a growing body of research is revealing just how effective such other actions can be. In short, it seems, they can change a lot more than we might think. 

Now a project named Shift (Super High-Impact Initiative for Fixing Tomorrow) has created a questionnaire to help guide people towards their most impactful climate actions, tailored to each person's individual circumstances and based on scientific research.

Kimberly Nicholas, professor at Lund University Centre for Sustainability Studies in Sweden, launched the guide alongside Project Drawdown, a US non-profit which focuses on science-based solutions to climate change. The BBC spoke to Nicholas to find out which personal actions really tend to make the most difference for the climate, according to the evidence.

What is the Shift guide and how did it come about?

For the last 10 years, I've been working on identifying and communicating effective climate action. I started thinking a lot about how consumer actions are really important, but they're not enough, and we need to focus more broadly on a set of "climate superpowers", as I call them. I and other researchers identified those five roles in a paper published in 2021, and they were also taken up by the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], the UN climate panel in its 2022 report.

The consumer is one of them, but it's also how people engage as citizens, investors, professionals and role models. We wanted to help people recognise the power they already have to make a really big difference for climate and essentially direct people towards what we know works, what we have evidence that moves the needle. I see it as connecting personal and systemic change.

Research by Felix Creutzig and others has shown it's possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions 40-80% with changes that involve behaviour change or demand-side change. They're complimentary to and connected with changes in infrastructure and norms and policies, but they do involve people making changes in their everyday life.

I have a philosophy with Shift: I want to eliminate the noise, just focus on the few really big actions that we have strong evidence make a big difference, and try to break those into small, doable steps that people can take. I've used as much literature as exists to rank actions in the order of effectiveness. So you know, it's eat the frog first – put the big stuff up front and start with the thing that can make the biggest difference.

Your questionnaire starts by asking three main questions: is your income over $38,000 (£28,000), do you live in a liberal democracy and do you have a college degree. Why did you choose these three things? 

Essentially, it's to focus on the most effective superpowers. This is living in a democracy for citizen actions, earning over the income threshold for consumer and investor actions, and having a college degree for professional actions. And then role model actions applied to everyone, because everyone is part of different communities and circles, neighbourhoods, groups, families, where they can inspire and influence and learn from and help create conversations with others.

Income is the most clear: we know about half of climate pollution from households comes from a group that makes over $38,000 (£28,000) a year, and the majority of climate pollution comes from household consumption, so 60-72%. So we're not going to cut emissions in half and eventually get to zero without addressing high-polluting households. 

The investor role is also connected to income: many people probably have a bank, even if they don't have huge investment money. 

Then the professional actions were connected to education. This is maybe the most tenuous, but assuming that if you have a higher degree – so a university college degree, or vocational school, some kind of tertiary education – you're more likely to have a professional position that gives you an opportunity to use your powers at work in a really effective way.

The group that will say yes to those three questions will have all five superpowers. It's less than 10% of people on Earth who actually belong to that group. Globally, they are among the most powerful people who have ever lived. If people can realise that and start using that power effectively, I really believe that it can make a transformation happen for climate action. 

If you answer yes to all three questions, the top 'climate superpower' given is your role as a citizen. How much impact can people really have as citizens?

There's really good evidence that citizen actions are important for changing climate policy. The best study comes from Seth Wynes. He quantified the climate footprint of voting from the 2019 election in Canada, and found that it made an enormous difference because there was a party that was rolling back effective climate policies. A vote for the Liberal party that year was calculated to save up to 34.2 tonnes of climate pollution per year.

So voting is a really important climate action. But to have the chance to vote, you need to live in a liberal democracy where you have multiparty, free and fair elections. And that's only about 12% of people on Earth, according to the Varieties of Democracy Project.

A second action is joining a group that's pushing for ambitious climate policy. As an individual citizen it can be overwhelming to know what is a good climate policy and who is making them, so groups that have professionals studying and evaluating that are really effective. A study in the US, for example, found that politicians who got a good rating from the League of Conservation Voters did measurably reduce emissions in their states.

There is also just using your own particular skills. Basically, any job can be a climate job. Many people are in jobs they like and are good at and have important skills in, and we need those people to, for example, do procurement from a climate angle or human resources from a climate angle. To have a world where we meet climate targets, we need all these puzzle pieces to come together.

And then pushing on your industry through, for example, trade organisations – making sure they're not obstructing climate policy, that the whole industry is setting and following good standards, that you're trying to move together towards zero emissions. 

The investor role is another you identify as a superpower role. What does research show is the impact people can have with where they put their own money – including for people on a more modest income?

Investments do create a lot of pollution, because we give our money to companies who invest them in fossil fuels basically, either directly or indirectly in funds. Banks lend out our money to others, including companies that are still expanding fossil fuels.

We have to be phasing out and winding down fossil fuel infrastructure and closing it ahead of its planned lifetime to meet climate goals. So, we've given them a chance, but we need to take our money out of the institutions that are still investing in climate pollution and invest it in solutions instead.

There's good evidence for the highest income Americans in particular – that's the top 1% income Americans earning $554,000 (£411,934) a year at the household level – that their personal climate pollution from investments is very substantial. For the top 0.1%, with income above $2.2m (£1.6m), investments are the largest source of emissions.

Small investors also matter though. Banks need customers to function – that is part of their business model. So if their customers are saying, we don't want to bank somewhere that is investing in fossil fuels, that will ultimately force them to change that business model. Whoever you are, if you have the possibility to change to a fossil free bank, that's a really high-impact action. [Read more about why banking habits matter for the climate].

Another superpower role is the 'consumer' role, which highlights only four actions: reducing flights, driving, meat consumption and switching to renewables. But you also specifically highlight that Shift is not a carbon footprint tool – is that a criticism of the focus on cutting the carbon footprint of our consumption?

There are great carbon footprint tools out there. They can certainly be helpful and can be really eye opening for someone getting started on their climate journey. But personally, I think analysis paralysis is a real risk: more information and more decimal points on data doesn't always help people make better decisions.

For the consumer role, we picked the top leverage actions shown by researcher Diana Ivanova's work. She did a big meta-analysis [a study of studies] in 2020 with 60 household-based consumer actions quantified for emissions reductions potential.

Ninety per cent of people on Earth don't need to reduce their carbon footprint. They're already at or pretty close to a sustainable carbon budget. And if we make the transitions we need to zero carbon food, energy, housing and transport systems, their level of consumption will be within that carbon budget.

But it's also the case that overconsumption of fossil fuels is a problem. The top 10% of consumers are something like 10 times over the sustainable carbon budget. Especially from flying and driving, the top 1% is 22 times over the sustainable carbon budget. So it's not going to be possible to meet climate goals without changes in overflying and overdriving, basically, for that group. [Read more about how the rich are driving climate change.]

Still, there's a lot of important actions that we don't have the data to quantify yet. And we know that bigger shifts need to happen to stabilise the climate. For example, how much is it worth to use your skills as a lawyer to help push the industry towards decarbonising as a whole, or as a creative to stop producing adverts for fossil fuels and shift the culture?

What if you earn less than $38,000, don't live in liberal democracy and don't have a university degree. Is there evidence you can still help shift the dial on climate?

Then you would see the role model actions, which everyone will see. These are about taking action yourself in your own life and inspiring others.

A lot of it is about creating climate community – that's actually the number one action as a role model. So building a group of people in your context, whether that is people who love to knit or run, or a group at work, or your friends, neighbourhood, that you can actually talk about and do climate things with. I have a climate book club that I love, for example.

There's lots of research showing the majority of Americans and of people around the world are worried about climate change and want stronger climate action to happen, but they underestimate how much other people care about climate change. It creates this kind of loop of silence where we think, "Oh, no one else is so interested. This isn't a topic, I'm not going to bring it up. I'm not going to ask about it in the budget at work. I'm not going to mention it in my school meeting." So bringing it up and having these conversations is really important climate action, and it does help to shift those norms over time.

Hopefully people taking the guide, going through the quiz, will have a bit of an aha moment, of realising, 'wait a minute, I have more power than I thought, and there's more that I can do'. There truly is so much unused power in the world, and especially in the US, where I originally come from, that could do so much good. So I would love to see people taking these actions throughout their lives. 

I picture this as a couple hours a week, 20 minutes a day is definitely enough. If you do that consistently, you would get through this guide and all the actions in it in good time. There's just a huge, huge, huge potential, and it doesn't have to be that hard. So pick an issue that you feel motivated and passionate about. You can't do everything. I think the solution to sustainable climate action is finding things you like doing with people you like spending time with and keep doing them

Cover photo: From Getty Images