🔗 Share this article

For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets 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 decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – 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 react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the sustainable business 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Emerging Policy Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that allow 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 discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.