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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement 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 widespread assurance breakdown. 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 decades of drought 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 reduce their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Models

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, 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 carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent 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 destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is stark: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that permit 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 masks a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.