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For many years, halting climate change” has been the central objective of climate politics. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate activists to high-level UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, aquatic and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adjustment 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 engineering-focused framing sidesteps 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 backstop 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 laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens 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 equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Expert-Led Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

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 carbon elimination. 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, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 vulnerable regions 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 stark: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to stay in place 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.