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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will influence 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic 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 answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve 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 links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, 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 – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Forming Strategic Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 danger zones 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 cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

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