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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts 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 handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Effects

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 severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government backstop 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 laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting 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 familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration 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 whose vision will prevail.