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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to elite UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement 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 proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Governmental Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. 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 reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.