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For many years, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening 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 institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to fit 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The terrain 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.