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For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, hydrological and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish 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 high-risk markets 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 achieving an agreement to fit 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Moving Beyond Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past 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 growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but resource-heavy, 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 prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Forming Governmental Debates

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 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 difference is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.