🔗 Share this article

For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate activists to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.