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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central aim of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, 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 provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

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 growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless 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 public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, 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 prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Developing Policy Debates

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.