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For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come 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 include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the institutions 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 national authorities support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record 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 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 engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive 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.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: 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.