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For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens 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 fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Developing Policy Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.