Who Decides The Way We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from grassroots climate advocates to senior UN representatives, lowering 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 experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, aquatic and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the organizations that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee 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 theoretical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. 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 record 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 react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
Transitioning From Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, covering the sustainable business 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 conflicts about ethics and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support 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 carbon cutting perspective. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Moving Past Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.
Forming Governmental Conflicts
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will prevail.
