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For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary goal of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the institutions 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 central administration support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are fights about principles and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited 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 lease stabilization, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.