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For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Across the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of 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 ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy 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 excluded 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Forming Strategic Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 complete governmental protection. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 obscures a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.