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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular goal of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids 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 act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee 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 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 surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – 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 respond to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning 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 represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about values and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm 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 cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware 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 forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Forming Governmental Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 discarded. 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 restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.