🔗 Share this article

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Spanning the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused 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 federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit 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 implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced 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 current ideological battles.

Forming Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: 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 succeed.