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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will shape 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? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services 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 emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Forming Policy Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 price signaling to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.