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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe 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 solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers 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 prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that economic tools 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, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined 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, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating 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 ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Forming Governmental Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to remain 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.