Who Chooses The Way We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate activists to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
Moving Beyond Specialist Models
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the economic pressure, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long prevailed climate discourse. In insisting 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 appear not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled 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 existing societal conflicts.
Developing Governmental Battles
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to continue living 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.