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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central aim of climate politics. Across the ideological range, from local climate activists to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological 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 modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 reduce their water usage. How we respond to these political crises – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing 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 completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.

Forming Governmental Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.