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For many years, halting climate change” has been the primary objective of climate governance. Across the ideological range, from local climate campaigners to high-level UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. 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 threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about values and balancing between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain 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 connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Emerging Strategic Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.