Who Chooses The Way We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a altered and more unpredictable climate.
Ecological vs. Political 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 modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps 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 guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Specialist Systems
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are fights about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, 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 fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective 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 blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, 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 destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Forming Governmental Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that enable 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.
