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For many years, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect 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 implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of 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 ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Forming Governmental Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates 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 sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 prevail.