Who Decides The Way We Adapt to Climate Change?
For many years, “stopping climate change” has been the primary aim of climate politics. Spanning the ideological range, from local climate advocates to high-level UN representatives, curtailing carbon emissions to prevent future catastrophe has been the central focus of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also embrace struggles over how society handles climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, water and land use policies, national labor markets, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adapt to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.
Environmental vs. Societal Impacts
To date, climate adjustment has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: strengthening seawalls against ocean encroachment, enhancing flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this structural framing avoids questions about the systems that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to act independently, 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 guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers toiling in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact 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 high-risk markets 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 equip 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 compensated Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we answer to these political crises – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a specialist concern for specialists and technicians rather than genuine political contestation.
Moving Beyond Expert-Led Systems
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized the prevailing wisdom that economic tools would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved ineffective, the focus transitioned to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen numerous 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 fights about values and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.
Yet even as climate migrated from the realm of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of carbon elimination. 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, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but resource-heavy, 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 handle the climate impacts already transforming everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes clearer once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something totally unprecedented, 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 decimated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather part of existing societal conflicts.
Developing Governmental 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 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 divergence is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to push people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits 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 exclusive focus on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more current situation: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reshape our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and which perspective will triumph.
