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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. 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, property, water and land use policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers 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 fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services 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 fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm 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 excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Strategic Battles

The terrain 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The difference is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

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