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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 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 fit 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive 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 changing everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming 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 appear not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 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 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 enable 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 obscures a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.