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For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, hydrological and land use policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Political Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions 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 central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Governmental Debates

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 high-risk areas 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 sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – 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 hides a more immediate reality: 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 prevail.