Who Determines The Way We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For many years, preventing climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Throughout the political spectrum, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.
Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and more unpredictable climate.
Environmental vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. 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 risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity 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 cut their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.
From Specialist Models
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets 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 fights about values and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate moved from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Moving Past Catastrophic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy 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 existing challenges made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to existing societal conflicts.
Developing 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 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The difference is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits 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 discarded. But the sole concentration 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.
