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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus 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 solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and territorial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 threatened 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 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 react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming 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 appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The landscape 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 vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other commits 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 abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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 which perspective will prevail.