What Entity Determines How We Adjust to Climate Change?
For a long time, “stopping climate change” has been the primary goal of climate policy. Spanning the diverse viewpoints, from local climate advocates to senior UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future catastrophe has been the guiding principle of climate strategies.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being felt. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on preventing future catastrophes. It must now also include struggles over how society handles climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, property, hydrological and land use policies, employment sectors, and local economies – all will need to be completely overhauled as we adjust to a changed and increasingly volatile climate.
Natural vs. Political Consequences
To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against sea level rise, upgrading flood control systems, and adapting buildings for severe climate incidents. But this engineering-focused framing ignores questions about the organizations that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Do we enable property insurance markets to act independently, or should the federal government backstop high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that solely assist property owners, or do we provide 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 theoretical. In the United States alone, a increase in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate endangers 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 equip air conditioning in delivery trucks. That same year, after prolonged dry spells 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 decrease their water usage. How we respond to these governmental emergencies – and those to come – will embed fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these conflicts remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a technical matter for experts and engineers rather than real ideological struggle.
Transitioning From Technocratic Systems
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol symbolized 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 truly ideological. Recent years have seen any number of political battles, covering the eco-friendly markets of Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act versus the social democracy of the Green New Deal to debates over state control of resources in Bolivia and mining industry support in Germany. These are conflicts about principles and balancing between competing interests, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate shifted from the realm of technocratic elites to more established fields of political struggle, it remained restricted 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 lease stabilization, public child services and subsidized mobility will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but high-consumption, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same ideological creativity to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already reshaping everyday life.
Moving Past Apocalyptic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more evident once we abandon the apocalyptic framing that has long characterized climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become unaware to the reality that, for most people, climate change will manifest not as something completely novel, but as known issues made worse: more people priced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers obliged to work during heatwaves, more local industries destroyed after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.
Developing Policy 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 subject 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 complete governmental protection. The divergence is sharp: one approach uses economic incentives to prod people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of planned withdrawal through economic forces – while the other dedicates public resources that permit them to continue living safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. 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 reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will succeed.
