🔗 Share this article

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to senior UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow 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 only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip 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 cut 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 purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets 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 balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force 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 forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Forming Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 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 contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – 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 abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.