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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

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 include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, water and territorial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome 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 forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Policy Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis 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 whose vision will triumph.