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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary aim of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will shape 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 support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving 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 reduce their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited 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 rent freezes, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing 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 blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Governmental Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – 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 discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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 which perspective will triumph.