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For many years, halting climate change” has been the singular objective of climate politics. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate activists to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has arrived 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 struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, hydrological and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we establish federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, 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 stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Beyond Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled 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 existing societal conflicts.

Emerging Strategic Debates

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 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 divergence is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that allow them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 which perspective will prevail.