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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from local climate activists to senior UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – 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 react to these political crises – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

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 unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize 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 current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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 which perspective will succeed.