🔗 Share this article

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence 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? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 decrease their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism 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 ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, 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 manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing 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 oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people forced 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Developing Strategic Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions 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 sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

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