Which Authority Chooses How We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular aim of climate policy. Across the political spectrum, from local climate activists to elite UN negotiators, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate plans.
Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society manages climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Risk pools, property, hydrological and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a altered and growing unstable climate.
Environmental vs. Societal Consequences
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and modifying buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused 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 function without restriction, or should the federal government support high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we ensure equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a national insurance crisis. In 2023, UPS workers warned of a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately winning an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at unprecedented levels – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to decrease their water usage. How we answer to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.
Moving Beyond Expert-Led Frameworks
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to carbon cutting. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol embodied the prevailing wisdom that market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept rising and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus shifted 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 social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and balancing between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted to the realm of emissions reduction. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which connects climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, comprehensive family support and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more budget-friendly, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same political imagination to adaptation – changing social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Transcending Apocalyptic Perspectives
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we move beyond the catastrophic narrative that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely destroy human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something utterly new, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged 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 Conflicts
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. 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 high-risk areas like California. By contrast, a progressive research institute has proposed a system of Housing Resilience Agencies that would provide universal catastrophe coverage. The divergence is stark: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through economic forces – while the other allocates public resources that enable them to stay in place safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be neglected. But the exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will succeed.
