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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from local climate advocates to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. 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 endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving 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 cut their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode 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 professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond 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 common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to national-level 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 conflicts about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing 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 utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Developing Policy Battles

The terrain 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 high-risk areas 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 cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.