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For a long time, halting climate change” has been the singular goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, water and spatial policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles 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 Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, spanning 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely emissions math.

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 associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting 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 appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Governmental Battles

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended reforms to the property insurance market to expose 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 complete governmental protection. The difference is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other commits 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 sole concentration 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 what ideology will prevail.