Which Authority Chooses The Way We Adapt to Environmental Shifts?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular goal of climate governance. Spanning the ideological range, from community-based climate campaigners to elite UN representatives, lowering carbon emissions to prevent future crisis has been the central focus of climate policies.
Yet climate change has come and its material impacts are already being observed. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Risk pools, property, water and spatial policies, employment sectors, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adapt to a changed and more unpredictable climate.
Natural vs. Societal Impacts
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this infrastructure-centric framing avoids questions about the organizations that will influence how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities guarantee high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers working in extreme heat to their management's decisions, or do we implement federal protections?
These questions are not theoretical. 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 widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers proposed a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately achieving an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after decades of drought left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at historic lows – threatening water supplies for 40 million people – the Biden administration provided funds to Arizona, Nevada and California $1.2bn to reduce their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will encode radically distinct visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the purview of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for specialists and technicians rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Technocratic 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 market mechanisms would solve climate change. But as emissions kept growing and those markets proved ineffectual, the focus moved to national-level industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, including the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the progressive economics of the Green New Deal to debates over public ownership of minerals in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about ethics and negotiating between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained limited to the realm of decarbonization. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which associates climate to the cost-of-living crisis, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an pollution decrease lens. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to avert future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Transcending Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we reject the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overcome human civilization, climate politics has become blind to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something completely novel, but as existing challenges made worse: more people excluded 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 continuous with ongoing political struggles.
Forming Governmental Debates
The battlefield of this struggle is beginning to develop. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested reforms to the property insurance market to expose homeowners to the “full actuarial cost” of living in vulnerable regions 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 economic incentives to prod people out of vulnerable areas – effectively a form of organized relocation through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that permit 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 singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides 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 whose vision will succeed.
