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For decades, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate governance. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions 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? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. 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 unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these political crises – 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 specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Forming Governmental Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 difference is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will succeed.