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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate governance. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install 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 cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted 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 rent freezes, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out 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 existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable 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 reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.