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For decades, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

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 harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave 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 surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the eco-friendly markets 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 principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted 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 lease stabilization, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming 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 manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people priced 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 connected to current ideological battles.

Forming Governmental Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The contrast is pronounced: 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 allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration 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 which perspective will prevail.