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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – 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 respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism 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 mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Policy Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that allow 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.