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For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores 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 only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens 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 equip 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning 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 struggles about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, 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 stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Forming Strategic Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

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