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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from local climate activists to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge 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 threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the green capitalism 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit 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 completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced 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.

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 sharp: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit 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 masks a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.