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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the primary goal of climate governance. Spanning the political spectrum, from local climate campaigners to elite UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, aquatic and territorial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these political crises – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Technocratic Models

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the sustainable business 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Doomsday Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out 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 part of current ideological battles.

Emerging Governmental Conflicts

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions 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 stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – 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 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 immediate reality: 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.