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For decades, halting climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to elite UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come 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 embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, aquatic and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.

From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating 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 emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 manifest not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather continuous with current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Conflicts

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

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