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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. 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. Coverage systems, property, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the institutions 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 central administration 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 toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits 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 sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.