The accelerating climate crisis compels a fundamental reappraisal of the Quantity Surveyor’s (QS) role within South Africa’s built environment. Traditionally confined to cost estimation, procurement, and contractual control, the QS profession is increasingly confronted with the imperative to embed sustainability and resilience at the core of its practice. This paper undertakes a narrative literature review, drawing on recent scholarship from Scopus, Web of Science and IBSS from the authors selective reading pool, to synthesise knowledge at the intersection of sustainability, climate action, and professional transformation. Five thematic strands emerge: the centrality of sustainability and climate imperatives, the inadequacy of the traditional QS role, persistent barriers to change, enabling drivers and opportunities, and the new competencies required for future practice. The study advances the Sustainable Climate Action in the Built Environment (SCABE) Theory, constructed through Dubin’s (1978) interpretive post positivist model of theory building. SCABE specifies constructs, propositions, boundaries, and system states that capture the QS profession’s evolution from ‘cost-centric equilibrium’, through ‘transitional disequilibrium’, toward a ‘sustainability-centric equilibrium’. It demonstrates how competency barriers, skills deficits, cost perceptions, regulatory weakness, moderate professional adaptation, while future drivers, digitalisation, green finance, energy costs, and policy momentum, enable transformation. The theory positions the QS as a strategic actor capable of operationalising sustainability and climate imperatives through life cycle costing, circular economy strategies, and climate-risk advisory.Epistemologically, SCABE complements recent frameworks such as social tipping processes, green and circular building theory, resilience modelling, and social innovation in the built environment, by supplying a profession-specific lens that bridges macro-level imperatives with micro-level practice. Normatively, it charts a pathway for education, practice, policy, and professional leadership to reposition QSs as agents of systemic change. The study concludes that unless the QS profession embraces this transformation, it risks marginalisation; conversely, by adopting SCABE, QSs can reassert their relevance as architects of a just, resilient, and sustainable built environment.