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For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace conflicts over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and territorial policies, workforce systems, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a changed 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 engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 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 societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Expert-Led Systems

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, spanning the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about principles and negotiating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but high-consumption, 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 – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Moving Past 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 unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something completely novel, but as known issues 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 current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 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 continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.