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For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the singular objective of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading 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 function without restriction, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind 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 obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The landscape 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 vulnerable regions 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 stark: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 whose vision will prevail.