For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.
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. Risk pools, housing, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and more unpredictable climate.
Natural vs. Governmental Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.
From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the green capitalism 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged 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 ongoing political struggles.
Developing Governmental Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.
