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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, hydrological 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. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this engineering-focused framing ignores 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 operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets 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 securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed 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 materialize not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Policy Battles

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 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 sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that permit 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 abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.