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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from local climate campaigners to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and territorial policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a altered and growing unstable climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish 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 risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview 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 Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond 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 rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets 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 fights about principles and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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 affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Beyond Doomsday Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded 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 connected to current ideological battles.

Forming Policy 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 subject 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 difference is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that permit 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 altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.