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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from grassroots climate activists to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish 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 risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. 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 decades of drought 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 decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. 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 national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems 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 continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Developing Governmental Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that allow 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 abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.