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For many years, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the systems 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 national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling 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 increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the eco-friendly markets 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration 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 what ideology will prevail.