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For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about values and mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, 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 – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing 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 appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 difference is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable 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 abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.