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For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the central focus 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 solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit 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 cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the eco-friendly markets 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 struggles about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive 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 fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, 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 – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as known issues 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is stark: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks 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 which perspective will succeed.