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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate governance. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived 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 embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge 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 countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level 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 progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about ethics and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Developing Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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 whose vision will prevail.