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For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring 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 widespread assurance breakdown. 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 prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms 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 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out 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 connected to current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.