Your individual action matters. But not for the reason you've been told.

For years, the climate conversation has been stuck in a loop. On one side: change your diet, fly less, switch to an EV. On the other: stop asking individuals to fix what corporations and governments broke. Both camps talk past each other. Both miss something important.

New research published in Nature Climate Change offers a way out of this trap. It maps almost perfectly onto what Terry was built to do.

The paper, by Kukowski et al. (2026), introduces what they call the "a-frame": an agency frame for thinking about climate action. The core insight is deceptively simple: individuals and systems are not opposites. Systems are made of people. People shape systems. The separation was always artificial.

What makes the a-frame different is where it looks for leverage. Instead of asking "what can a consumer do?", it asks: in which roles do people have the most influence? The researchers identify five: citizen, professional, investor, consumer, and role model. Depending on who you are and where you sit, some of these roles carry far more systemic weight than others.

A hospital procurement manager choosing a plant-based catering supplier doesn't just reduce canteen emissions. They shift supply chains, set professional norms, and create a precedent other institutions might follow. A city planner who redesigns a street for cycling doesn't just move people. They reshape what behaviour feels normal and possible. These are what the researchers call high-agency, high-impact actions: embedded in real roles, with real ripple effects.

Terry starts from the same logic, applied to the role most people already play every day: consumer.

Most people can't easily influence procurement policy or reshape urban infrastructure. But almost everyone shops. Terry redirects the money already flowing through those everyday transactions: a train ticket with NS, an order via Bol.com, a new phone from Coolblue. It turns a slice of that into a free donation for nature and climate projects. No extra cost. No extra effort. The purchase happens exactly as it always did.

This isn't presented as the end of the story. Terry is clear about its own position: buy less, but when you do, buy better. It's not an excuse to consume more. It's a way to make the consumption that's already happening do something useful, while the deeper shifts in policy, infrastructure, and professional norms are still being fought for.

The researchers are honest about one uncomfortable truth: agency is not equally distributed. A frontline worker and a company executive may share a job title but have vastly different power to change how that company operates. The a-frame doesn't paper over this. It calls for targeting those with the greatest systemic reach, while also expanding the conditions that make action possible for everyone else.

Terry's consumer-role approach is precisely that kind of expansion. It meets people where they actually are. An active Terry user generates between €4 and €9 per month in donations for projects like Trees for All, The Pollinators, or Stichting Rechten van de Natuur. Not by doing something new, but by letting an existing behaviour carry more weight.

There's a third binary the paper takes on: behaviour change versus technological change. The argument is equally important. Even the most promising clean technologies require social adoption, cultural legitimacy, and supportive norms to scale. What we do in our lives still matters. Not instead of technological or policy change, but alongside it.

The a-frame doesn't ask us to choose between individual action and system change. It asks us to see that the two are the same process, viewed from different angles. Every individual who acts from a position of influence, as a professional, a citizen, a role model, is already doing system change. And every consumer who uses Terry is part of that same chain: small actions, aggregated, shifting what's normal.

At Terry, we've always operated on this assumption: that collective impact is made of individual actions, and that individual actions, done well, are a form of collective action. This research gives that intuition a name, a structure, and a growing evidence base.

Your action matters. Not because it saves the planet on its own. But because you are part of a system. And systems change when enough of the people inside them do.

Article: Leveraging agency for climate change mitigation | Nature Climate Change
Free read:Leveraging agency for climate change mitigation | Nature Climate Change
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