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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate activists to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adaptation 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 systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike 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 install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 decrease their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business 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 struggles about values and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but energy-intensive, 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 – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest 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 devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Developing Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield 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 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 contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living 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 transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.