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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Across the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting 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 act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain 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 companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets 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 achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved 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 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 struggles about principles and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Emerging Strategic Conflicts

The terrain 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The difference is stark: 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 allow 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 discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 whose vision will triumph.