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For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from local climate campaigners to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric 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 operate freely, or should the federal government 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 toiling 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 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 answer to these political crises – 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 professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation 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 societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks 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 what ideology will succeed.