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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from local climate activists to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and land use policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing avoids 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 function without restriction, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed 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 record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Expert-Led 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 economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, 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 – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing 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 familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Developing Policy Battles

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 subject 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 difference is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that allow 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 neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.