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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response 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 ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling 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 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 winning an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets 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 fights about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force 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 completely novel, but as existing challenges 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Developing Governmental Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 what ideology will prevail.