🔗 Share this article

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids 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 central administration 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 employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic 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 respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to national-level 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems 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 current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 difference is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other dedicates 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 abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.