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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 decrease their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide 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 lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing 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 political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.