🔗 Share this article

For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install 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 respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct 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 real ideological struggle.

From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the sustainable business 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 conflicts about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Developing Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.