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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying 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. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of 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 fights about principles and mediating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, 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 pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm 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 familiar problems made worse: more people forced 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 connected to ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Battles

The landscape 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.