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For decades, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to elite UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving 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 act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already evolved past 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 rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about values and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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 affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental 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 subject homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The difference is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that enable 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 immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.