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For many years, halting climate change” has been the singular goal of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

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

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 endangers 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 prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – 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 radically distinct visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Emerging Policy Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to continue living 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.