What Entity Decides How We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular goal of climate politics. Across the political spectrum, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the organizing logic of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Political Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing avoids questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. 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 risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to fit 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 provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than authentic societal debate.
From Technocratic Systems
Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the dominant belief that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous political battles, including the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the economic pressure, arguing that housing cost controls, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive 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 changing everyday life.
Transcending Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely overcome 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 familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.
Emerging Strategic Battles
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently recommended 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 complete governmental protection. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through commercial dynamics – while the other dedicates public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
