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For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Across the political spectrum, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Risk pools, housing, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to cut their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Specialist Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended 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 growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are fights about principles and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon 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 totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded 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.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The landscape 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 danger zones 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 organized relocation through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis 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 whose vision will prevail.