🔗 Share this article

For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from local climate activists to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced 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 existing societal conflicts.

Developing Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 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 difference is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit 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 immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.