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For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the central aim of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. 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 reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, aquatic and land use policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit 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 respond to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about values and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained restricted 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 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 emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled 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 current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to subject homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas 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 economic incentives to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates 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 sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks 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.