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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle 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 preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and spatial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens 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 years of water scarcity 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 reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism 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 balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, 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 prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Emerging Strategic Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 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 divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits 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 abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.