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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

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

Environmental vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the institutions 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 federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 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 react to these political crises – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned 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 democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

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 decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, 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 – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Battles

The landscape 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 difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: 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 triumph.