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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue 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 represented the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the sustainable business 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 conflicts about ethics and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond 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 oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Forming Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that permit 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 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 reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.