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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks 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 years of water scarcity 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 establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about principles and mediating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Governmental Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other dedicates 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.