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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to elite UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, 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? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism 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 negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but energy-intensive, 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 – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as known issues 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation 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 abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.