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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence 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 solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones 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 equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about principles and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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 affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

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 all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Battles

The battlefield 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.