🔗 Share this article

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused 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 national authorities support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose 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 increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

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 symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing 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 appear not as something utterly new, 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Developing Strategic Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas 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 stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.