🔗 Share this article

For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition 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 solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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.