Who Decides How We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For a long time, preventing climate change” has been the central objective of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to high-level UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass debates over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and spatial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be radically remade as we respond to a transformed and more unpredictable climate.
Natural vs. Governmental Effects
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the institutions that will condition how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving 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 decrease their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for professionals and designers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Expert-Led Frameworks
Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen countless political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and coal phase-out compensation in Germany. These are fights about ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely emissions math.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as familiar problems made worse: more people forced out 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 connected to existing societal conflicts.
Developing Strategic Debates
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to subject 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 difference is pronounced: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that enable 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more immediate reality: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.
