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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Political Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

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 ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. 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 manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the catastrophic narrative 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 utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Policy Battles

The battlefield 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 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to stay in place 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.