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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps 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 function without restriction, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 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 install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 respond to these governmental emergencies – 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 engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the green capitalism 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare 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 truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon 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 blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled 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 ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Governmental Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: 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 triumph.