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For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate activists to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and land use policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we establish 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.