Who Determines The Way We Adjust to Climate Change?
For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central goal of climate politics. Throughout the ideological range, from local climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Societal Effects
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Technocratic Systems
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including 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 fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate migrated 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 links climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating 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 ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Transcending Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.
Forming Governmental Battles
The terrain 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 divergence is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be discarded. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures 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 prevail.
