🔗 Share this article

For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts 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.

From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of 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 competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward 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 moving for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Debates

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 expose 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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.