🔗 Share this article

For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate advocates to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm 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 existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Emerging Policy Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to subject homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

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