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For decades, halting climate change” has been the singular objective of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

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 harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Specialist Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is stark: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that allow 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 abandoned. But the exclusive focus 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 which perspective will succeed.