🔗 Share this article

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and territorial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable 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 provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 decrease their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide 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 democratic socialism 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 values and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm 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 compelled 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 current ideological battles.

Emerging Strategic Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

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