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For many years, preventing climate change” has been the central goal of climate governance. Throughout the political spectrum, from grassroots climate activists to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the organizing logic 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 exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Natural vs. Governmental Impacts

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against coastal flooding, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing sidesteps 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 central administration support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we enact 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.

Transitioning From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about principles and balancing between conflicting priorities, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate shifted from the realm 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 associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. 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 manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Narratives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we reject the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an unstoppable phenomenon that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 existing societal conflicts.

Forming Policy Conflicts

The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide complete governmental protection. The divergence is pronounced: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that enable 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 discarded. But the exclusive focus 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 which perspective will triumph.