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For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

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 forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Political Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions 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? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge 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 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 reduce their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning 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 represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms 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 any number of political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about ethics and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but energy-intensive, 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 – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.