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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the institutions 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 backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold 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 employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 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 achieving an agreement to install 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to stay in place 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 obscures a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.