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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular objective of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to senior UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural 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 national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, 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 decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Governmental Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed 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 difference is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between 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 transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.