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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the singular goal of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, hydrological and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working 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 risks 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 install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Debates

The battlefield 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – 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 infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.