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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Spanning the ideological range, from local climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow 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 management's decisions, or do we establish 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms 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 genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. 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 free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Forming Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.