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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, water and territorial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation 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 fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Forming Strategic Conflicts

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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.