🔗 Share this article

For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish 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 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 record 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 respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

From 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 market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the sustainable business 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 struggles about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain 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 connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated 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 completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Policy Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.