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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate activists to elite UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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 associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Policy Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.