🔗 Share this article

For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling 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 increase 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 securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – 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 technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. 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 moving for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy 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 existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Forming Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that allow 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 discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.