What Entity Determines The Way We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, “stopping climate change” has been the primary objective of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from grassroots climate activists to high-level UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future crisis has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has arrived and its real-world consequences are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society addresses climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, residential sectors, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this structural framing ignores questions about the systems 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 central administration backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Should we abandon workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond high-risk markets in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers proposed 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 paid Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than authentic societal debate.
Moving Beyond Expert-Led Models
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to federal industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen countless political battles, spanning the sustainable business of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the democratic socialism of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate moved from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that rent freezes, universal childcare and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A completely holistic climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the doomsday perspective 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 unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will materialize not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people priced 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 unique specialist task, then, but rather connected to ongoing political struggles.
Forming Strategic Conflicts
The terrain of this struggle is beginning to take shape. 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide comprehensive public disaster insurance. The contrast is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of managed retreat through economic forces – while the other commits public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: 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 succeed.
