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Although the treaty is not yet in force, if it ever becomes international law, it will represent a major step forward toward nuclear disarmament. And even states that have not signed the nuclear ban treaty can already feel its stigmatizing effects: British banks and U.S. cities are divesting from the nuclear weapons industry, and nuclear powers are increasingly forced to defend their nuclear stance against social and ethical demands for disarmament.

If nations can come together to ban something as precious to great powers as nuclear weapons, why can’t they at least try to do the same for carbon emissions? Unlike a nuclear war, which represents a terrible but highly unlikely future threat, carbon-induced climate change is a human catastrophe already in motion.

A 2012 report of experts published by the aid organization DARA International calculated that 400,000 people die every year as a direct result of carbon-induced climate change. According to the journalist David Wallace-Wells, writing in New York magazine, scientists project that catastrophic heat waves, food shortages, and warming-induced plagues will hit the earth in only a few decades. The latest—and inherently conservative—report from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns of extreme weather and the displacement of millions of people.

Like nuclear disarmament, the key problem in global climate governance is not our scientific understanding of the problem. Rather, it is creating the political will to solve it. Political incentives work against action. The states most responsible for the problem are the least likely to feel its immediate effects and are therefore the least willing to make drastic changes.

Meanwhile, because the rest of the global community is so desperate to get the veto players on board, they have reduced climate governance efforts to the lowest common denominator. This is why the Kyoto Protocol and Paris agreement didn’t ban the use of carbon or require switching to carbon-free energy sources (like nuclear power). Rather, such treaties have focused on incremental changes. Yet even if all states met their commitments, it would be too little, too late.

What has a chance of working is to shake the carbon villains out of their cost-benefit thinking by adopting a moral shaming approach. Climate change is an existential threat to vulnerable populations—and, eventually, we will all be vulnerable. Shaming people into sacrificing for the common good is what wins wars, fuels wartime economies, and generally helps populations accept and enforce austerity measures in times of conflict. The same approach will help the global community address climate change, but only if laggard nations are first shamed into cooperating with those who are already feeling the heat.

In this, climate change activists could take a page from nuclear disarmament activists’ playbook. They should stop treating climate change as an economic problem that can be solved through carbon trading, or an environmental issue that requires collective action by the worst offenders on behalf of the planet. Instead, eliminating carbon emissions must be seen as a moral and humanitarian imperative requiring decisive action regardless of whether the United States and China agree. To do so, they will need to build a strong set of global norms prohibiting carbon emissions.

This approach has worked well in solving other global problems, especially in the area of weapons regulation, where the worst offenders are also least interested in change. Research shows that to replace patchwork global governance approaches with solid global prohibition norms, activists must ask states to adopt ambitious goals rather than move in incremental steps. To avoid incrementalism, the activists marginalize the veto players by creating invite-only forums for like-minded powers to solve jointly understood problems. To encourage cooperation among the non-like-minded, they valorize norm leaders and shame (rather than appease) norm laggards. Perhaps most importantly, they articulate issues through a humanitarian and moral lens. This shift in rhetoric has the power to change the entire conversation around an issue—and it can lead to rapid policy innovation.

Consider the case of nuclear weapons. Like climate change, nuclear weapons represent an existential security threat to nations, human beings, and the planet. And like with climate change, in the nuclear arena, a majority coalition of weak states, middle powers, and nonstate actors favored strong action, while a few powerful veto players hobbled progress. The veto players pushed for incremental reforms: better safeguards, gradual reduction of nuclear stockpiles, and bans on testing and technology transfer but not on the weapons themselves.

After decades working unsuccessfully through the Non-Proliferation Treaty conference forum, ban advocates finally changed strategies in 2006. They began to talk about nuclear weapons not as a threat to state security but as a global humanitarian issue. They began calling on states to abandon the Non-Proliferation Treaty and ban the weapons altogether. They started organizing their own, separate conferences, inviting states to sign the “Humanitarian Pledge.”  Ultimately, 122 nations did so, and the document has already started to influence how nuclear nations justify their arsenals. As political scientists know, this is the first step in global normative and political change.