🔗 Share this article

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring 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 increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode 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 specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation 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 truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, 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 destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

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