Which Authority Chooses The Way We Respond to Climate Change?
For decades, preventing climate change” has been the singular objective of climate governance. Across the diverse viewpoints, from grassroots climate campaigners to senior UN delegates, lowering carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the organizing logic of climate plans.
Yet climate change has materialized and its tangible effects are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus only on averting future catastrophes. It must now also encompass struggles over how society manages climate impacts already reshaping economic and social life. Insurance markets, property, aquatic and territorial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be completely overhauled as we respond to a altered and more unpredictable climate.
Environmental vs. Political Consequences
To date, climate adaptation has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: reinforcing seawalls against ocean encroachment, improving flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for harsh meteorological conditions. But this infrastructure-centric framing ignores questions about the systems that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Is it acceptable to permit property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the federal government guarantee high-risk regions? Is it right to uphold disaster aid systems that only protect property owners, or do we provide equitable recovery support? Is it fair to expose workers laboring in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we enact federal protections?
These questions are not hypothetical. In the United States alone, a surge in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond vulnerable areas in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a widespread assurance breakdown. In 2023, UPS workers warned of 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 political crises – 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 professionals and designers rather than authentic societal debate.
Moving Beyond Technocratic Systems
Climate politics has already evolved past technocratic frameworks when it comes to emissions reduction. Nearly 30 years ago, the Kyoto protocol represented the common understanding 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 genuinely political. 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 state control of resources in Bolivia and fossil fuel transition payments in Germany. These are struggles about values and negotiating between opposing agendas, not merely carbon accounting.
Yet even as climate moved from the domain of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas 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 lease stabilization, universal childcare and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating 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 political imagination to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to stop future warming, but also to handle the climate impacts already changing everyday life.
Beyond Catastrophic Framing
The need for this shift becomes more apparent once we reject the apocalyptic framing that has long dominated climate discourse. In insisting that climate change constitutes an overwhelming power 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 totally unprecedented, but as known issues made worse: more people forced out of housing markets after disasters, more workers forced to work during heatwaves, more local industries devastated after extreme weather events. Climate adaptation is not a distinct technical challenge, then, but rather continuous with existing societal conflicts.
Forming Strategic Debates
The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently proposed reforms to the property insurance market to make vulnerable 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 comprehensive public disaster insurance. The divergence is stark: one approach uses price signaling to push people out of at-risk locations – effectively a form of organized relocation through market pressure – while the other commits public resources that permit them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain rare in climate discourse.
This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the sole concentration on preventing climate catastrophe obscures a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will restructure our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and what ideology will triumph.
