Climate mitigation and adaptation are often evaluated through carbon metrics, but climate actions also redistribute effects across air, water, soils, ecosystems, public health, and communities. This Review narrows its contribution to a Climate-Environmental Quality (CEQ) screening framework for early-stage climate portfolio design. CEQ is presented as a heuristic decision-support protocol, not as a substitute for life-cycle assessment, environmental impact assessment, integrated assessment modeling, legal consultation, or a validated quantitative index. We synthesize recent evidence on technological decarbonization, nature-based and land-management solutions, governance and finance, and community implementation, while distinguishing high-confidence consensus claims from context-dependent evidence and illustrative examples. The framework classifies interventions as no-regrets, conditional, opportunistic, or avoid/deprioritize by combining climate-benefit confidence, environmental-quality co-benefits or trade-off risk, equity and acceptance sensitivity, and safeguards/MRV readiness. We add explicit calibration guidance, uncertainty rules, and a worked farm-watershed example to show how CEQ can convert broad climate claims into transparent screening judgments. The synthesis supports high confidence for options such as clean power, energy efficiency, and methane abatement when safeguards are credible, while treating BECCS, soil carbon crediting, nitrification inhibitors, wetland restoration, CCS/CCUS, and carbon markets as context-dependent options requiring conservative accounting and local calibration. CEQ is therefore best used as a transparent screening and learning tool that helps decision makers ask whether climate portfolios are not only low-carbon, but also protective of environmental quality and socially durable.