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For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular goal of climate governance. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from community-based climate campaigners to senior UN negotiators, curtailing carbon emissions to avert future disaster has been the guiding principle of climate policies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its real-world consequences are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Insurance markets, housing, hydrological and territorial policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Societal Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and modifying buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this engineering-focused framing sidesteps questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Should we continue disaster aid systems that solely assist 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 surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers threatened 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we react to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish completely opposing visions of society. Yet these battles remain largely outside the scope of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.

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 common understanding that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. 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 lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely emissions math.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the politically progressive agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the affordability emergency, arguing that housing cost controls, comprehensive family support and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from moving for more affordable, 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 – transforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something totally unprecedented, but as familiar problems made worse: more people excluded 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 distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with ongoing political struggles.

Forming Policy Battles

The terrain of this struggle is beginning to emerge. 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 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 contrast is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to encourage people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – 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 neglected. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already reshaping our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.