🔗 Share this article

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe 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 include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic 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.

Ecological vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused 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 operate freely, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. 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.