Who Determines How We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from local climate activists to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.
Natural vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact 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 vulnerable areas 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 securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.
Transitioning From Technocratic Systems
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. 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 shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.
Developing Strategic Battles
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will prevail.
