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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct 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 genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 ethics and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out 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.

Developing 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 make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions 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 cost indicators to push people out of vulnerable areas – 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 discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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.