🔗 Share this article

For many years, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Throughout the ideological range, from local climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed 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 cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are fights about principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

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 ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy 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 known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The landscape 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 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 divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

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