🔗 Share this article

For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Across the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working 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 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip 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 decrease their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past 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 rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Developing Governmental Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.