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For decades, halting climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Spanning the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. 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 prolonged dry spells 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 react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Systems

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 rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 fights about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing 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 utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Emerging Strategic Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

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