Which Authority Decides How We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Throughout the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Insurance markets, residential sectors, aquatic and spatial policies, national labor markets, and community businesses – all will need to be radically remade as we adjust to a transformed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Political Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing ignores questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we establish federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to fit air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after years of water scarcity left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than genuine political contestation.
From Technocratic Models
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 rising and those markets proved ineffective, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are fights about values and balancing between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more economical, 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 stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Doomsday Narratives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long characterized 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 manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.
Developing Policy Debates
The landscape 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 danger zones like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses price signaling to encourage people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that permit 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 abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more immediate reality: climate change is already transforming our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will triumph.
