Who Chooses How We Adjust to Environmental Shifts?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate governance. Spanning the political spectrum, from community-based climate advocates to elite UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate plans.
Yet climate change has come and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, water and land use policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and growing unstable climate.
Ecological vs. Societal Consequences
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against coastal flooding, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate threatens to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought 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 react to these political crises – and those to come – will encode completely opposing visions of society. Yet these conflicts 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.
Moving Beyond 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 commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus transitioned to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became genuinely political. Recent years have seen any number of 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 conflicts about values and negotiating between competing interests, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of decarbonization. Even the socially advanced agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that lease stabilization, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more budget-friendly, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.
Developing Governmental Debates
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to take shape. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 contrast is pronounced: one approach uses price signaling to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other dedicates public resources that allow 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 which perspective will triumph.
