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For decades, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit 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 increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. 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 prolonged dry spells 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 respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the sustainable business 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 conflicts about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The difference is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal 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 neglected. But the singular emphasis 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 prevail.