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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Policy Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.