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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society handles 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 completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. 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 risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Forming Governmental Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 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 divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis 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 whose vision will triumph.