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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring 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 surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising 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 numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Developing Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other allocates 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 discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.