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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold 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 enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce 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 experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, 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 fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Forming Strategic Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that enable 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks 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 prevail.