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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already transcended 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 growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as known issues 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is stark: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: 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 succeed.