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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate activists to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration support 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 employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the green capitalism 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 fights about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious 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 decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Strategic Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 difference is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates 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 neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.