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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers 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 fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 respond to these political crises – 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 specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out 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 part of ongoing political struggles.

Developing Strategic Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.