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For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate politics. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate activists to high-level UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, aquatic and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Consequences

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 extreme weather events. But this structural framing avoids questions about the institutions 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? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Developing Strategic Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.