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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular goal of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from local climate advocates to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural 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 federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond 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 any number of 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Forming Policy Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to continue living 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.