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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused 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 function without restriction, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 reduce their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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 affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, 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 stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Forming Strategic Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 vulnerable regions 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 cost indicators to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit 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 discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.