🔗 Share this article

For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster 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 averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused 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 federal government support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy 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 mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

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 politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, 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 destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The battlefield 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 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 contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.