🔗 Share this article

For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Throughout the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones 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 fit 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 reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, 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 stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized 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 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 devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Developing Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 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 stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – 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 infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.