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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from local climate activists to senior UN delegates, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also include debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – 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 answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but high-consumption, 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 – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm 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 existing challenges 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Debates

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 complete governmental protection. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that permit 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 abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: 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 succeed.