Which Authority Decides How We Respond to Environmental Shifts?

For many years, halting climate change” has been the central aim of climate policy. Across the ideological range, from grassroots climate activists to elite UN delegates, reducing carbon emissions to avoid future crisis has been the central focus of climate strategies.

Yet climate change has materialized and its material impacts are already being experienced. This means that climate politics can no longer focus exclusively on forestalling future catastrophes. It must now also encompass conflicts over how society manages climate impacts already altering economic and social life. Coverage systems, housing, water and spatial policies, workforce systems, and regional commerce – all will need to be fundamentally transformed as we respond to a changed and more unpredictable climate.

Ecological vs. Political Effects

To date, climate response has focused on the environmental impacts of climate change: fortifying seawalls against ocean encroachment, upgrading flood control systems, and retrofitting buildings for extreme weather events. But this structural framing sidesteps questions about the institutions that will shape how people experience the political impacts of climate change. Should we allow property insurance markets to operate freely, or should the central administration backstop high-risk regions? Do we maintain disaster aid systems that exclusively benefit property owners, or do we guarantee equitable recovery support? Do we leave workers working in extreme heat to their companies' discretion, or do we implement federal protections?

These questions are not imaginary. In the United States alone, a spike in non-renewal rates across the homeowners’ insurance industry – even beyond danger zones in Florida and California – indicates that climate risks to trigger a national insurance crisis. 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 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 answer to these societal challenges – and those to come – will establish fundamentally different visions of society. Yet these struggles remain largely outside the frame of climate politics, which continues to treat adaptation as a engineering issue for experts and engineers rather than genuine political contestation.

From Technocratic Frameworks

Climate politics has already transcended 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 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 countless political battles, including the eco-friendly markets 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 mining industry support in Germany. These are struggles about ethics and mediating between opposing agendas, not merely pollution calculations.

Yet even as climate shifted from the preserve of technocratic elites to more recognizable arenas of political struggle, it remained restricted 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, public child services and no-cost transportation will prevent New Yorkers from relocating for more economical, but resource-heavy, life in the suburbs – makes its case through an carbon cutting perspective. A truly comprehensive climate politics would apply this same societal vision to adaptation – reforming social institutions not only to prevent future warming, but also to manage the climate impacts already changing everyday life.

Transcending Apocalyptic Perspectives

The need for this shift becomes clearer once we move beyond the doomsday perspective that has long characterized climate discourse. In arguing that climate change constitutes an all-powerful force that will entirely overwhelm human civilization, climate politics has become oblivious to the reality that, for most people, climate change will appear not as something utterly new, but as known issues made worse: more people excluded 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 separate engineering problem, then, but rather part of current ideological battles.

Developing Strategic Battles

The landscape of this struggle is beginning to emerge. One influential think tank, for example, recently suggested 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 universal catastrophe coverage. The contrast is stark: one approach uses cost indicators to push people out of endangered zones – effectively a form of managed retreat through commercial dynamics – while the other commits public resources that allow them to remain safely. But these kinds of policy debates remain infrequent in climate discourse.

This is not to suggest that mitigation should be abandoned. But the singular emphasis on preventing climate catastrophe masks a more present truth: climate change is already altering our world. The question is not whether we will reform our institutions to manage climate impacts, but how – and whose vision will prevail.