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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving 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. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 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 respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism 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 conflicts about ethics and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive 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 transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing 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 blind 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 compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Forming Policy Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 difference is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.