What Entity Determines The Way We Adjust to Climate Change?

For a long time, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Throughout the ideological range, from community-based climate activists to senior UN representatives, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future disaster has been the central focus of climate plans.

Yet climate change has arrived and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus solely on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also embrace debates over how society handles climate impacts already transforming economic and social life. Coverage systems, residential sectors, aquatic and land use policies, national labor markets, and local economies – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we adjust to a transformed and increasingly volatile climate.

Environmental vs. Governmental Consequences

To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against sea level rise, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting 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. Do we enable property insurance markets to function without restriction, or should the national authorities support high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their employers’ whims, or do we implement 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 danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers to trigger a countrywide coverage emergency. In 2023, UPS workers threatened a nationwide strike over on-the-job heat exposure, ultimately securing an agreement to install air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells left the Colorado River’s reservoirs at record 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 governmental emergencies – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts 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.

Moving Beyond Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already moved beyond technocratic frameworks when it comes to mitigation. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the dominant belief that commercial systems would solve climate change. But as emissions kept increasing and those markets proved unsuccessful, the focus moved to countrywide industrial policy debates – and with it, climate became authentically contested. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the green capitalism of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over lithium nationalization in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are conflicts about values and balancing between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.

Yet even as climate migrated from the domain of technocratic elites to more familiar domains of political struggle, it remained confined to the realm of carbon elimination. Even the ideologically forward agenda of Zohran Mamdani’s NYC mayoral campaign – which links climate to the economic pressure, arguing that rent freezes, public child services and free public transit will prevent New Yorkers from fleeing for more affordable, but energy-intensive, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an emissions reductions framework. A fully inclusive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – transforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to address the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Catastrophic Framing

The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we abandon the doomsday perspective that has long dominated climate discourse. In claiming 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 appear not as something completely novel, but as familiar problems made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers compelled to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a unique specialist task, then, but rather part of ongoing political struggles.

Forming Strategic Debates

The battlefield 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The difference is sharp: one approach uses cost indicators 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 few and far between in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe hides a more current situation: 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.