🔗 Share this article

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from local climate advocates to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, aquatic and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems 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 support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, 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 avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond 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 materialize not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 continuous with ongoing political struggles.

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 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.