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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the singular goal of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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 cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive 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 Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.