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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. 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 reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Political 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 severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the organizations 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 national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism 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 pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Developing Governmental Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.