Who Determines How We Adjust to Climate Change?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the central goal of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from local climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the guiding principle 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 exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society addresses climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Ecological vs. Political Effects
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and adapting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing ignores questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.
Moving Beyond Specialist Frameworks
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. 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 no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Moving Past Doomsday Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long prevailed climate discourse. In claiming 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 totally unprecedented, 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 devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.
Emerging Policy Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 vulnerable regions like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – 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 neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.
