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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being felt. 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. Risk pools, residential sectors, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas 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 achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts 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.

From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing 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 any number of political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.