🔗 Share this article

For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out 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 part of ongoing political struggles.

Forming Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. 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 restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.