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For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Ecological vs. Political Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the institutions 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 central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens 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 install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

Moving Beyond Specialist Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools 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 any number of political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more budget-friendly, 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 – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as known issues 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 Strategic Conflicts

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 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 stark: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 what ideology will prevail.