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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to senior UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue 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 implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase 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 warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. 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 affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy 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 existing challenges 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 connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Strategic Debates

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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation 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 neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.