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For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the singular objective of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.

Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be radically remade as we adapt to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Societal Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the national authorities backstop high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?

These questions are not hypothetical. 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 threatens to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record 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 respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Technocratic Systems

Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, including the sustainable business 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 coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about ethics and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains 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, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, 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 – changing social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Moving Past Doomsday Framing

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather connected to current ideological battles.

Developing Policy Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.