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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular goal of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Governmental Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.