Which Authority Chooses How We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?

For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the singular objective of climate policy. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to high-level UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Effects

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 extreme weather events. But this structural framing ignores 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 operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 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 years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – 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 encode fundamentally different 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 authentic societal debate.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about principles and mediating between conflicting priorities, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon 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 totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out 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 continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the singular emphasis 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 what ideology will triumph.